4. Systematic Reviews and NVivo
Systematic reviews are closely related to literature reviews. Systematic reviews are often much more rigid in their data collection and evaluation than traditional literature reviews. As such, there are a few other things to keep in mind when you are conducting a systematic review in NVivo.
Video: The Steps of a Systematic Review
Tip 1: Know when to import
Systematic reviews can contain several hundred articles and references which the researcher will whittle down over the course of their research. Importing all of these immediately into NVivo can cause a lot of headaches and make your database significantly harder to navigate.
As such, I would recommend leaving it as late as possible to import your reference data into NVivo for a systematic review. Instead, utilise the tagging and organisational features of reference data management tools to keep track of your systematic review.
Tip 2: Keep it consistent
Consistency is key to working through a systematic review. Whilst NVivo can help to organise your reference data, it's up to you to ensure that you treat that data consistently.
I would recommend writing a quick central memo that covers the key steps and processes of your systematic review in NVivo, which you and other researchers can refer back to so as to ensure that you are treating your data consistently.
Tip 3: Queries can be your best friend
When you import your reference data into NVivo, you can use the queries tool to give you an overview of the imported data. This can help you to identify trends and key words in your research to help with the overall selection process.
Queries can be your worst enemy though, and relying on them too much can stop you from substantively engaging with your reference data. It's still vitally important to ensure that you are going through the research to ensure that you are sticking to the methodology outlined in your systematic review.
Wrapping up
This module has aimed to introduce you to the key ways that NVivo can help you conduct your literature review. We've primarily looked at how the functions outlined in previous modules - node organisation, file classifications, and queries - can help to achieve this.
By the end of this module, you should know how to:
Import reference data
Use annotations to critically engage with our reference data
Use this approach to prototype and develop a writing methodology for literature reviews
Use NVivo to help you perform a systematic review
More broadly, I hope this module has introduced key methodological concepts around prototyping your writing, and ensuring that you remain critically engaged with your literature.
In the next module, you'll learn how to use NCapture to scrape pages off of the web, and how this can be used to import and treat Twitter data in NVIvo
Thank You!
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This module was prepared by Alex Shermon. You can follow him on Twitter here or on LinkedIn here.
If you have any questions about this module, or NVivo more broadly, you can get in touch with Alex via email at alex.shermon@unimelb.edu.au
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