What is a framework? - A systematic literature review in the field of information systems

Abstract

The term ‘framework’ appears very often in scientific publications like journals and conferences. However, there is no universal definition of a framework. It seems that the term is not used in a consistent way by authors publishing on frameworks since they have very little in common compared to each other. The goal of this work is to analyse and show how frameworks in the fields of information systems are handled in the scientific literature over the past 10 years as well as giving a universal definition of the term ‘framework’ based on the relevant studies. The systematic literature review will serve to identify those studies and to categorize the identified frameworks. The contributions of this work are (1) a general overview about frameworks in the past 10 years, (2) a proposed categorization of frameworks and (3) a general definition of the term ‘framework’.