New set of guidelines will help students doing literature reviews

“The purpose of these guidelines is to help students successfully write their master’s theses using the literature review methodology, a key analytical competence, which is a fundamental pillar of evidence-based education and practice. Most available guidelines for conducting literature reviews on quantitative studies focus on systematic reviews today. However, this type of review is known for being time- and resource-consuming, often beyond what a graduate student can achieve in relatively short period (16 weeks),

“Conducting a systematic literature review is challenging not only for students but also for supervisors and examiners. The potential mismatch in expectations between students, supervisors, and examiners may lead to students underperforming. To address this challenge, we designed the proposed guidelines to help students conduct a feasible literature review without compromising the quality of their work.”

What is being covered in these guidelines?

“The guidelines are structured around 12 steps, covering the entire process from planning a literature review to submitting the final manuscript. These steps are designed to be completed within the 16-week timeframe allocated for students to write their master’s thesis in Sweden,

“Throughout these 12 steps, students will learn how to develop a search strategy, search for studies, extract data, appraise and synthesize evidence under supervision. Additionally, for each of these 12 steps, we offer tips based on our experience supervising students in the field of public health sciences.”

In what ways do these guidelines help public health students handle the challenges of delivering a high-quality systematic review?

“In the guidelines, we present an alternative review type, the systematized review, which is based on the same principles as a systematic review (transparency and reproducibility) but is designed to ensure feasibility given the time and resources available to graduate students. This means that students who choose to conduct a systematized literature review using these guidelines will develop the necessary skills to write a systematic review.”

Could the guidelines be useful for students of other social science disciplines?

“Although the guidelines are designed for the master’s programme in public health sciences at Stockholm University, they can certainly be valuable for other social science disciplines. In fact, given the social science perspective on public health offered by our master’s programme, we believe the guidelines could be highly applicable to other social science programmes.”

The paper Guidelines for the Use of Literature Reviews in Master’s Theses in Public Health was published recently in the scientific journal Pedagogy in Health Promotion.

Håkan Soold