Supervisor
Supervisor
On this page, we set out some advice about what to consider when supervising a literature review at bachelor's, master's, or PhD level. These tips are based on extensive experience with questions from students and staff in connection with advising on literature searches.
Be aware that the literature search is only a small part of the overall methodology to be used when conducting a literature study or a large systematic literature review. As a supervisor, you need to be familiar with the whole 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 result of what has been learned.
This is a step in the literature search process where, in our experience, students encounter the most problems, and where basic input from the supervisor can mean a great deal 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 supervision 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 searching for literature.
Identifying the project's main thematic concepts is often seen as a major challenge for students. An important method to use, before beginning to identify the important search terms for a project, is to ask oneself the following question: Which main concepts in my research question do I want to find in relevant publications? Here, the supervisor and student can have a good conversation/discussion about the main concepts the given project seeks to examine. Encourage students to translate main concepts into English. Ordnett.no and other digital reference works can be good starting points for this. Remember that all major bibliographic databases for literature searches use English as the main language.
Perhaps you have heard of PICO or similar tools for formulating research questions? They can sometimes be useful for identifying the main thematic concepts in a 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 suggest 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 relevant databases and see how they are indexed. In this way, the student can find the controlled vocabulary search terms that have been used to index these articles. This is a very useful tool for identifying the scientific terms used for the main concepts for the project, as well as for finding relevant search terms. The supervisor should invite discussion about the process of finding relevant search terms. This work always involves finding the correct scientific search terms in English that 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 vocabulary search terms, if the database uses these.
Supervisor and student should also start the work of entering search terms into our search table template together.
The supervisor should be able to suggest which databases, and how many, can provide the best search results for the specific project. The responsibility for ensuring that the student searches in the best reference database(s) lies with the supervisor. The University Library is always available for information about relevant databases, if required. As a minimum, the supervisor should have the necessary knowledge to build structured searches in relevant databases. They should therefore 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 end result that the supervisor is closely involved. Once the student has conducted their initial literature search, it is recommended that the supervisor and student evaluate the result together. There will always be room for improvements or adjustments to the initial literature search. This could involve finding more search terms for each main concept, removing search terms that return irrelevant references, or reconsidering which main concepts 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, a systematic approach and the end result.
Here, the supervisor should have an overview of the relevant databases that should be used in the particular project. The supervisor should also have a good understanding of the challenges involved in carrying out a given search using the interfaces of other databases. Feel free to look at our examples for different academic levels.