Supervisor
Supervisor
In this document, we provide you with some advice on what to consider when supervising a literature review at the bachelor's, master's, or PhD level. These tips are based on extensive experience with questions from students and staff in connection with guidance in literature searches.
Be aware that the literature search is only a small part of the total methodology to be used in conducting a literature study or a large systematic literature review. As a supervisor, you must be familiar with the methodology.
We base our advice on our 5-step method. Remember that the 5-step method is also, in a sense, an abstraction, in that the steps in practice may overlap somewhat, and one often needs to return to a previous step as a consequence of what is learned.
This is a step in the literature search process where our experience indicates that students encounter the most problems, and where simple actions from the supervisor can mean a lot for the student's progression and understanding of the methodology.
It is important to remember that you as a supervisor are the expert, and that the students may need several hours of guidance before they have a good understanding of what the project actually entails. We often meet students who are unable to explain what the project is about, and we consequently cannot provide the necessary information about literature searches.
Identifying the project's main thematic elements is often seen as a major challenge for students. An important method to use before finding the important search keywords in one's project is to ask oneself the following question: Which main elements of my project do I want to find in relevant publications? Here, the supervisor and student can have a good conversation/discussion about the main elements the given project seeks to examine. Feel free to challenge the student to work out a translation of the main elements into English. Ordnett.no and other digital reference works can be good starting points for this work. Remember that all relevant databases for literature searches use English as the main language.
Perhaps you have heard of PICO or other such problem formulation frameworks. They can sometimes be useful tools for identifying the main thematic elements of our research question. However, our experience is that they often do more harm than good, precisely because they trick us into starting with an overly complex structure.
To facilitate the work and understanding of how to build a structured and systematic literature search, we propose that you use our template for what the search setup might look like.
The supervisor should provide the student with access to or tips about relevant articles. The student can then look these up in the relevant databases and check their indexing. Here, one will always find the controlled search keywords with which these articles are indexed. This is a very useful tool in the work of identifying the terminology of the main elements of the project, as well as finding relevant search keywords. The supervisor should invite discussion about the process of finding relevant search keywords. This work always involves finding the correct scientific search keywords in English, which are suitable for the specific project you are working on.
If you are an experienced supervisor, you should also demonstrate how the student can use the relevant databases and how you can look up controlled search vocabularies if the database has these available.
Supervisor and student should also start together with writing search keywords into our proposed template for the search.
The supervisor should be able to suggest which and how many reference databases can provide the best search results for the specific project. The responsibility for ensuring that the student searches in the currently best reference database(s) lies with the supervisor. The university library is always available for information about relevant databases, should it be desired. At a minimum, the supervisor should have the necessary knowledge of how to build structured searches in relevant databases. Therefore, the supervisor should have familiarized themselves with our online resource for structured and systematic database searches and the examples at the relevant level. See our overview of relevant reference databases.
In this step, it is crucial for the final result that the supervisor gets involved. Once the student has conducted their initial literature search, it is recommended that the supervisor and student together evaluate the result. There will always be room for improvements or adjustments to the initial literature search. This could involve finding more search keywords for each main element, removing search keywords that return irrelevant references, or reconsidering which main elements to build the search around. Remember that international publications may use synonymous terms that you as a supervisor have not heard of. Therefore, it is important that this work is carried out with an open mind and a focus on structure, systematics and the final result.
Here, the supervisor should have an overview of the relevant databases that should be used in the current project. The supervisor should also have a good understanding of the challenges involved in executing a given search with the interfaces of other databases. Feel free to look at our examples for different academic levels.
