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Leadership and Sustainability

Including articles

Start by reading the article titles. For the articles that seem relevant to your research question, proceed to read their abstracts to decide whether to read the full text. Before diving into the entire article, it's a good idea to check that the articles you want to include are peer reviewed.

Inclusion/exclusion criteria?

Once you've confirmed that the included articles are scholarly, you can proceed with a full review and include those that meet your inclusion criteria. Exclusion criteria are the elements of an article that disqualify the study from inclusion in a literature review. For example, you can ask the following questions:

  • Study population: Does the study focus on the same population that you want to investigate with your research question?

Example: managers, employees, women, men, administrators, job seekers

  • Context: What context/situation is the subject of the study?

Example: private sector, public sector, medium-sized companies, universities, office environments, digital meetings

  • Study design: What method has been used, qualitative or quantitative? Your research question determines the study design that the articles should have.
    Relevance: Are the results of the article still current, or do you need to find more recent studies? If there isn't much published, you may need to use older studies.

Evaluate

Evaluating scientific articles

The main criteria used to assess scientific reliability are broadly the same for both quantitative and qualitative articles, there should be a well-defined aim, clearly described sample, method, analysis and results. However, the questions you can use for the assessment differ slightly, since the quantitative method is used to indicate numerical relationships, which the qualitative method does not.

Review and assess quantitative studies

  • Research question: Is the hypothesis clear and distinctly formulated?
  • Study population: Is it clear who the study participants are? How large is the sample?
  • Selection: How was the selection made? Is the selection controlled? Is it randomized and if so, how?
  • Data collection: Is the data collection method appropriate based on the research question?
  • Outcome: What is the result and is it reliable?

Review and assess qualitative studies

  • Research question: Is the purpose clearly stated? Is it appropriate to use a qualitative method to answer the purpose?
  • Selection: How was the selection made?
  • Data collection: Is the data collection method suitable based on the research question?
  • Analysis: Is it clear how the analysis was done? Is the analysis anchored in the data?
  • Researcher role: Have the researchers examined their own role and bias?
  • Outcome: Is the result clear? Does it seem reasonable?