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.