A five-step guide for validating umbrella reviews with bibliometric and network indicators

This paper presents a simple five-step guide for validating umbrella reviews—or literature reviews of existing literature reviews—using bibliometric and network indicators. The recent and unprecedented proliferation of scholarly output entails a need for robust review protocols to synthesize and systematize scientific publications, as well as tools that are suitable for assessing review quality, such as the one presented in this paper. Adopting our five-step guide as a final robustness check will improve the rigor, transparency, and objectivity of umbrella reviews and, therefore, strengthen their representativeness of the knowledge base within a specific research domain. We apply the developed five-step guide to an existing umbrella review on flexible work arrangements as a case study. Finally, we discuss the role of artificial intelligence in the expanding scientific publication landscape. We highlight how human judgment will remain a pivotal element when using algorithmic tools to support literature reviews.