It has been argued that fake news and the spread of false information pose a threat to societies throughout the world, from influencing the results of elections to hindering the efforts to manage the COVID-19 pandemic. To combat this threat, a number of Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches have been developed. These leverage a number of datasets, feature extraction/selection techniques and machine learning (ML) algorithms to detect fake news before it spreads. While these methods are well-documented, there is less evidence regarding their efficacy in this domain. By systematically reviewing the literature, this paper aims to delineate the approaches for fake news detection that are most performant, identify limitations with existing approaches, and suggest ways these can be mitigated. The analysis of the results indicates that Ensemble Methods using a combination of news content and socially-based features are currently the most effective. Finally, it is proposed that future research should focus on developing approaches that address generalisability issues (which, in part, arise from limitations with current datasets), explainability and bias.
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