Once you have found your search words and made some search strings, it is important to define the criteria for your search. This step involves specifying the type of literature you are interested in. Are you looking for primary research articles, review articles, theoretical works, handbooks, or something else? It is also crucial to consider the scope of your search. How many articles do you have the capacity to read thoroughly and use in your study? In academia, we talk about inclusion and exclusion criteria - some can be incorporated into your searches, while others should be implemented by manual selection.
We recommend that you consider the following:
2.1. Define inclusion and exclusion criteria for your literature search.
2.2. Consider which types of literature you should use for your study.
When defining the scope of your project, it may be necessary to set up a series of inclusion and exclusion criteria. Inclusion criteria are the characteristics that make an article or source relevant to your study, such as specific topics, time periods, or methodological approaches. Exclusion criteria, on the other hand, are the factors that determines that an article or source should not be included, for example, irrelevant topics, lack of methodological quality, or publications outside a specific timeframe.
Once you have found key search words and made your search strings, it is important to define the criteria for your search. This involves specifying the type of literature you are interested in. Is it literature about a particular geographical area, a specific target group, a specific time period, or a particular methodological approach? You should consider whether the sources should be newer than 10 years. It can be useful to make a table with these questions to make well-considered decisions that reflect your problem formulation.
Example of a table with inclusion and exclusion criteria
| Inclusion | Exclusion |
|
Articles from after 2020 Language: English Peer-reviewed articles Empirical research articles Focus on higher education Indexed in Scopus and WoS |
Articles published before 2020 Other languages than English Ikke peer-reviewed artikler Non-empirical articles (e.g. review articles) |
Some criteria can be incorporated directly into your search strings or used as filters in the databases. For example, you can use search terms like “Denmark” or “Scandinavia” to find literature from Denmark or the Nordic countries, or use specific filters in the database to limit the search to articles from the last 10 years. Other criteria that require a more nuanced assessment should be implemented by manual selection after the search. This means that you carefully review the found articles to ensure that they meet your set criteria before deciding which ones to include in your final bibliography.
Remember, inclusion and exclusion criteria can often change during a project, also during the search process itself, and for that reason it is necessary to review and adjust them continuously. By carefully defining and applying these criteria, you ensure that your literature search becomes more focused and relevant, which improves the quality and efficiency of your research.
An important part of your considerations about scope involves considering what type of literature you want to find with your search. Your choice of literature type should be made based on the information you need and it influences which databases you should search in, which will be elaborated in step 3.
Below is a brief overview of some of the most common types of literature that you can consider.
BOOKS often provide a more in-depth and detailed review of a topic. They will often also contain one or more introductory chapters that provide context and background for a given research field and topic. An anthology can be more fragmented as it gathers multiple authors’ perspectives on the topic. Books are most easily found in the library catalogue soeg.kb.dk, which both contain physical books and the e-books available to you.
RESEARCH ARTICLES are research that is published in academic journals. The articles are specialized and deal with a narrow topic with the intention of contributing to new knowledge in the field. They are relatively short, but at the same time complex, and can therefore still take a long time to read. It is an advantage to read articles that are peer-reviewed. The articles are most easily found in the library catalogue soeg.kb.dk or via one of the many academic databases that the library has available.
REVIEW ARTICLES are a type of research that analyzes and summarizes prior research within a given research field or on a specific topic. They are good at providing an overview of what is being researched and published. Review articles also often contain a high amount of references and are well suited as a starting point for chain searching.
REFERENCE ARTICLES are very short introductions to topics or concepts. This counts e.g. encyclopedia articles or reference articles in handbooks. These are often only a few pages long, but are a good place to start when getting started with a new topic. We recommend using the reference works that can be searched via the library catalogue on soeg.kb.dk.
METHODOLOGY LITERATURE is literature that describes methodology and approaches for collecting and analyzing empirical data. It could e.g. be how to conduct an interview, design a questionnaire or conduct a discourse analysis. Methodology literature you will best be able to find via the library catalogue on soeg.kb.dk.
STUDENT PROJECTS cover submitted semester assignments, theses and bachelor’s projects, which you can find in the library catalog on soeg.kb.dk. Student assignments are good for inspiration in terms of structure, methodology, and the literature used. But remember to be critical and that you should not refer to other people’s projects in your own.
GREY LITERATURE is literature that you most often cannot search for via databases and library catalogues. It can e.g. be reports from ministries or organizations that you can find via Google. Read more about grey literature on this link.
NEWSPAPER ARTICLES can give you an impression of how events have been reported or how experts, politicians, researchers express themselves about topics to the public. However, you should always try to find research that supports and nuances the argumentation, as statements to the media often are not detailed and can be opinion-based. Danish newspaper articles are most easily found in Infomedia or Mediestream.
When an article is peer-reviewed or published in a peer-reviewed journal, it means that it has been evaluated and approved by peers within the same research area to ensure quality and validity. Peer-review is a longer process where, for example, a research article has been read through (often in several rounds) by experts working within the same field. The article is only published once it has been validated in this process. Conversely, it can be rejected if it does not meet a number of criteria.
These criteria can, for example, involve transparency regarding the methodology, whether there is proper argumentation, whether the author omits central areas within the given field, correct citation/paraphrasing, whether the work is new and original, etc.
For you as a reader, you can thus regard a peer-review as a mark of quality.
As a student, it’s important to be realistic about how much literature you can go through and read for your project or assignment.
Overestimating your capacity can lead to stress and a lack of overview. Start by assessing how much time you have available, and how long it takes to read and understand each article.
Prioritize the most relevant sources and make a schedule that includes time to read, analyze, and write. Be realistic when planning your time, so you avoid wasting time reading unnecessarily much or irrelevant texts.
A well-considered start to your literature search ensures that you focus on the most relevant sources.