Documentary research, bibliometric research and systematic reviews

Abstract

Current technological advances have caused important changes in the ways of research. Particularly, a modality that has evolved significantly thanks to technology is documentary research, which in its origins was based specifically on the search and analysis of printed materials, until with the creation of networks and virtual environments, it began to work with documents in electronic and digital format. In view of this evolution, the objective of this article is to analyze the current characteristics of documentary research and its relationship with derived modalities, also based on obtaining secondary data extracted from documents, such as bibliometric research or bibliometric studies and systematic reviews. To achieve the objective, a traditional or narrative review was carried out, which consisted of an exhaustive search and analysis of the literature on the topic, including both classic works and recent scientific articles. The review concludes by highlighting that both bibliometric research and systematic reviews are categories of documentary research with their own explicit methods and whose current trend is, mainly, online search or academic databases present on the Internet, without excluding the possibility of analysis of printed documents not digitized until now, as continues to be done in some disciplines of the social sciences.