I recently read a "systematic review" somewhat like this, on smartphone applications for precision agriculture. The authors did conduct databases searches for articles about smartphone apps, but they also directly searched Google Play and Apple App Store sites for apps with high user ratings. Here is the citation:
Mendes, J., Pinho, T., dos Santos, F., Sousa, J., & Peres, E. (2020). Smartphone Applications Targeting Precision Agriculture Practices-A Systematic Review. AGRONOMY-BASEL, 6.
I have a research team wanting to do a review of a niche area of software packages. They are thinking that it'd either be a scoping review or a mapping review. Their corpus
would not be scholarly articles. Their synthesis will be based on what is gleaned from
The Comprehensive R Archive Network and other similar sources for the packages that meet their criteria. They do want to be comprehensive in identifying these packages.
Does anyone have familiarity with reviews like this? What are they called? Is there a name for a review like that? Or is it just a straight up review? Via Web of Science, I'm finding examples of similar (not exactly the same) topics where they are using review type names (e.g., systematic review) in the titles, but after digging deeper, I do not think that those reviews are by-definition systematic reviews, etc.
Any thoughts?
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Amy Riegelman (she, her, hers)
Social Sciences Librarian