3.3 Literature Review Guidelines
In activities 3.3 and 3.4, some tools to improve the quality and transparency of research planning and reporting will be presented. While many of these tools tend to be specific for different scientific fields, some apply across disciplines. In this activity, you will learn about one such fairly general guideline.
Whatever field you are working in or would like to explore in your master's thesis, you will be probably required to carry out some form of literature review. Put simply, literature review is an essential part of research process. You have learned about writing literature review in the bachelor Integrity program or in the other courses (here you can watch a short outline of review writing).
In this unit, we use literature review as an example to illustrate how the research procedures and reporting of results have become more standardized. The need for reliable methodology we discussed in the previous learning activity applies also to literature reviews: the way you prepare your review shall be systematic and transparent. That means that you should describe not only what you found in literature but also how you found and analyzed it. To help authors improve the reporting of literature reviews in their publications, PRISMA standard (Preferred Reporting Items of Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses) was developed in 2009. Look at the PRISMA Flow Diagram (http://www.prisma-statement.org/documents/PRISMA%202009%20flow%20diagram.pdf) and PRISMA Checklist (http://www.prisma-statement.org/documents/PRISMA%202009%20checklist.pdf).
Do not be afraid - master students are not usually required to meet this high standard of systematic literature review reporting (unless the review is a research project in itself or core of the thesis). Despite that, the knowledge of the PRISMA standard might help you to better plan and write this important part of your thesis.
Assignment
First, enter a (preliminary) title of your thesis as a title of new post in this forum. In one paragraph, describe briefly but concisely how you have prepared or plan to prepare the literature review for your thesis. Do you think that PRISMA Flow Diagram and/or PRISMA Checklist could help you to perform or/and report the literature review for your thesis in a more systematic way?