A Note of Caution on Systematic Literature Reviews in Entrepreneurship Research

In this research note we aim at clarifying the SLRs underlying approach and rational in order to discuss the challenges of using systematic literature reviews in the field of entrepreneurship. We describe three main challenges when undertaking systematic literature reviews in the field of entrepreneurship. First, identifying relevant research is very difficult in a field where there is definitional disagreement of phenomena and constructs is present. Second, due to the heterogeneity of the entrepreneurship field the specification of inclusion and exclusion criteria becomes an arduous task. Third, there is a tendency to be systematic in search but not in the analysis of the literature reviewed which leads to merely descriptive accounts of the literature. Based on these challenges we argue that more caution must be exercised both with respect to when we use systematic literature reviews and how we use them, and also in promoting SLR as a de facto standard of how to do literature reviews in the entrepreneurship field. We close this research note with some recommendations of when systematic literature reviews might have the potential to lead to independent contributions of its own.