Abstract The concept of resilience has gained immense popularity as a way to frame social and environmental challenges. However, its empirical operationalization and the integration of social and ecological dimensions continue to present difficulties. In this paper, we conduct a systematic review of existing empirical studies of resilience in social, ecological and social‐ecological systems (SESs) and examine how and to what extent these studies have achieved the operationalization of the concept of resilience. We evaluate the operationalization of resilience in 463 papers based on whether they define the system of interest and disturbances, whether they define resilience, whether they evaluate resilience, and for papers focusing on SESs, whether that evaluation integrates social and ecological dimensions. We find that 51% of empirical studies do not meet at least one of these operationalization criteria, and that even those that do often lack key features for effective operationalization, such as clear system boundaries and baseline state or an effective integration of social and ecological dimensions. Of the papers examining SESs and evaluating resilience, only 54% integrate social and ecological dimensions in that evaluation. Building on these findings, we propose some design guidelines for operationalizing future empirical studies of resilience. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.