Table 3

Steps of the systematic literature review

Step 1: Five searches in three databases:

  • Search No. 1: On Web of Science for heuristic* in titles, papers published between 1999 and 2020, further refined each sample by Management and then excluded everything except Management, Business, and Psychology

  • Search No. 2: On Web of Science for heuristic* managerial decision-making in titles, abstracts, and keywords, papers published between 1999 and 2020, further refined each sample by Management and then excluded everything except Management, Business, and Psychology

  • Search No. 3: On Web of Science for simple rules in titles, abstracts, and keywords, papers published between 1999 and 2020, further refined each sample by Management and then excluded everything except Management, Business, and Psychology

  • Search No. 4: In SCOPUS for heuristic* AND managerial AND decision-making in papers published between 1999–2020, further refined for Business and Psychology and then excluded everything else

  • Search No. 5: In Google Scholar, for “heuristics” or “simple rules” and “managerial decision-making” and added the first 50 results to the analysis

The results of all these searches made up an initial sample of 206 papers
Step 2: Manual exclusion criteria

  1. papers that use the term heuristic as an adjective (for example heuristic model, heuristic algorithm, heuristic transfer)

  2. papers regarding Critical Systems Heuristics and the Fairness Heuristic Theory

  3. papers from logistics research, operations research, machine learning, and modelling that reached the sample despite the automatic refining and excluding in the previous step

  4. papers using the term meta-heuristics

  5. papers that were not about heuristics (for example, influenced by the heuristics-and-biases school, some authors use the expression heuristics and biases to describe cognitive biases)

  6. non-empirical papers (conceptual, literature reviews, but also interviews, books, and from-the-editor articles)

  7. papers in which the authors proposed their own heuristic

  8. master theses

  9. two papers I could not retrieve

This process led to a final sample of 49 empirical papers
Step 3: AnalysisWhere multiple examples of heuristics were offered in a paper, only one was selected for illustration, with mentioning its domain of application. Then, the sample was organized on three criteria:

  1. Intent

  2. Articulation

  3. Sharing

  4. Adoption

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