Throughout the research cycle, researchers of all levels—from faculty to undergraduates to the librarians and staff that support them—will encounter the question: what is known about this topic, and where does my research fit into it? In recent years, there has been a push towards performing systematic reviews to answer this question. However, while systematic reviews can comprehensively survey the research topic, the process requires significant resources. Instead, insights and best practices from the systematic review process may help researchers review literature more effectively. This introductory-level presentation is focused on defining intuition about what a systematic review versus a literature review is, what hurdles there might be in performing systematic reviews, and how approaches developed in systematic reviews can still support create robust, reproducible literature reviews and minimize bias.