A systematic literature review: Demand flow technology

Everyone doing research and attempting to publish approaches the literature review with some trepidation. Has anything been published on my topic? Will I find substantive articles? Then after the literature review: Have I missed something? Did I miss the foundation article that everyone else knows about?... and the questioning goes on. There is little in the way of published guidelines for conducting a literature review. The most frequent method is to emulate another author that we feel has done a great literature review. To address these issues, this paper explicitly discusses the literature review process. To assist the discussion, a systematic literature review is conducted demonstrating step-by-step techniques that can assist the researcher in their endeavors. A topic has been identified for the purposes of this paper that has a relatively small finite number of published articles. "Demand Flow Technology" is the topic under consideration. The steps that are followed include: 1). Perform a literature search; 2). Obtain copies of the articles; 3). Record all of the articles in a Reference List; 4). Tabulate the articles according to one or more criteria such as "peer reviewed" versus "not peer reviewed"; 5). Use the results from #3 and #4 to identify potentially substantive articles; 6). Determine the significance or value of each article (e.g. is it the theoretical foundation, a good descriptive article, good for anecdotal evidence, etc.). By following these steps and other guidelines discussed in the paper, other researchers may gain a greater degree of organization for their research.