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Finding More Needles in More Haystacks: Rigorous Literature Searching for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses in Management and Organization Studies

With increasing numbers of publications, synthesizing research in management and organization studies (MOS) and the social sciences in general has become necessary to summarize knowledge, discover research gaps, and gather interdisciplinary insights. To do so, reviews of the literature depend on a rigorous method for searching specifically for MOS that is to date largely lacking. This article demonstrates a six-step protocol for setting up a rigorous search. Instead of sampling from a limited set of journals, it focuses on databases and uses information in thesauri, key articles, and automated text analysis to construct a search string. It details decision aids on database inclusions and syntax adaptations and discusses additional search techniques, with best practice examples. The six-step process provides practical considerations for authors and develops assessment criteria for journal editors and reviewers to judge the rigor of the search in terms of construct, internal, and external validity and reliability. Thus, the article facilitates more rigorous syntheses in the social sciences by focusing on the heart of any such endeavor, the search.