Scheduling issues have become a critical problem in the company because they affect manufacturing performance and production continuity. One of the production scheduling issues is the no-idle flow shop scheduling problem (NIFSP), which does not allow machines to be idle. This article attempts to present an analysis of published articles on NIFSP. This study employs a systematic review to examine 63 articles. The articles studied were published between 1981 and 2023. Article reviews are classified by country, year, publisher, journal/conference, objective function, classification of methods used, and NIFS variants. This article presents the review analysis results, research gaps, and future research directions. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024.