Literature Searching and Reviews

When preparing a review, you may need to have clear predefined eligibility criteria for inclusion and exclusion. You should have a clear idea of what is relevant to your review/thesis. Inclusion criteria could be e.g. time, language, countries, population or study types.

Not all criteria can be selected as a limit in the databases, the selected criteria will help you select/screen relevant studies.

In the humanities (and some parts of the social sciences) it can be more difficult to set up specific criteria, but it is still important to be clear about what may have been excluded along the way, for example if there are languages that you do not master (French, Russian etc.), types of publications or other. As a minimum, you should include Danish and English as languages, and for slightly older publications, German will often also be relevant.