Small rodent population cycles characterise northern ecosystems, and the cause of these cycles has been a long-lasting central topic in ecology. In the related publication, we present a systematic literature review on whether plants can cause rodent population cycles, dividing this idea into four different hypotheses with different pathways of plant impacts and related assumptions. We identified 231 studies from 150 publications covering studies from the temperate biome to the tundra, across various study systems, and different topics. The data on included and excluded publications are deposited here.