Literature reviews for PhD students

Organizer(s) Christian Østergaard Madsen and Paolo Tell, Software Engineering section

Lecturer(s): Christian Østergaard Madsen and Paolo Tell

Date(s) of the course: Week 41 (Monday October 6^th, Wednesday October 8^th, Friday October 10^th), 2025

Time: Monday 9:00 - 15:00, Wednesday 9:00 - 15:00, Friday 9:00 -15:00. Self-study Tuesday and Thursday

Room: TBA

Course description:

Conducting and writing a literature review is an important part of research projects and Ph.D. projects. A good literature review will summarize both what we know so far and what we need to know from future studies. Literature reviews can also be exceptionally time-consuming and difficult to carry out, especially for younger scholars. Therefore, it is vital that scholars follow a well-thought-out plan, are rigorous in their approach, and have a strategy for the dissemination of the review.

The course covers literature reviews at both theoretical and practical levels. The main focus is on the structured literature review. However, other forms of reviews will be discussed as well, and the course will be relevant for all PhD-students who will conduct a literature review. By attending this course, the participants will gain insight into the purpose of literature reviews for academic studies, and related pitfalls especially how to avoid spending too much time and the importance of knowing the target journal and audiences from the start. Through class lessons and discussions, the students will be introduced to a variety of different literature reviews. Further, the students will get practical experience with the different tasks involved in conducting a literature review through group and individual exercises. These tasks include deciding on the focus of the review, setting inclusion criteria, searching for relevant material though search engines, databases, and in journals; analyzing and coding the papers, and finally how to document the results of the review and presenting these results in an academic paper.

The course takes place during a five-day period, with lessons and group discussions on the first, third and fifth day. The second and fourth day of the course are reserved for practical tasks: searching for papers (day two) and analyzing and coding papers (day four). On these days the participants will apply the presented techniques for their own research purposes.

Exam and learning goals:

At the end of the course, the students must write a brief plan (3 standard pages) for a literature review. Here the students must demonstrate the ability to:

Briefly explain the purpose of literature reviews in academic studies in general, and describe how literature reviews are conducted within the student’s research area
Present an outline for conducting and disseminating a literature review, and argue for key choices made, including:
- An estimate for how long it will take to conduct the review, and the individual tasks
- The focus of the literature review: Topic, research field and possible outlets
- How and where the search for papers will be conducted, including the databases and journals where the search will be conducted, and the keywords used
- Inclusion and exclusion criteria
- The focus of the review: What will be analyzed, how and why
- The presentation and publication of the review: Selecting a target outlet, and creating a brief outline for a manuscript following the guidelines of the selected outlet

The students will receive a pass or fail grade.

Prerequisites:

The course is opened to PhD Students and postdocs.

Programme:

Day 1 - Introduction to course and the literature review process

Day 1: Introduction to course and the literature review process

Introduction to the course, the lecturers, and participants
Participants present each other’s theses and ideas for literature reviews

Lecture 1: What is a literature review (purpose and types of reviews)
- The systematic structured literature review in IS and SE
- The systematic mapping (briefly)
- The meta-review (briefly)
- The conceptual literature review (briefly)
- The problematization review (briefly)

Exercise 1: In small groups, participants discuss what type of reviews exist and are accepted in their field, what type of review they want to conduct and how it fits into their thesis

Lecture 2: Overview of the systematic literature review process – with examples
Exercise 2: Skim exemplary reviews and assess how long it took to conduct and write the review from start to finish

Lunch

Lecture 3: Part 1: Focusing the review

Deciding on the focus of the review and planning the review process
Setting selection criteria
Part 2: Searching for papers
- 1: Keyword search in journals and databases
  - Identifying keywords
  - Piloting the search
  - Quasi-gold standard
- 2: Backwards and forwards searches
- 3: Dialogue with experts

Part 3: Assessing papers and finalizing the pool of papers for the review
- Unavailable papers
- Skimming abstracts
- Documenting assessment process
Examples: A literature review according to (1) Webster & Watson and (2) Kitchenham

Coffee Break

Exercise 3: Identify search strategy for your review and motivate rationale (individual)
Exercise 4: Explore your chosen techniques by conducting initial searches and discussing results (pairwise)
Summary Day 1 and outline of self-study tasks for Day 2

Day 2 - Self-study - searching for papers and selecting papers for the literature review

Day 2: Self-study – searching for papers and selecting papers for the literature review

ITU and/or Royal Library

Participants continue searching for papers, skimming and discussing the results (exercise 3 and 4)

Day 3 - Analyzing and coding papers

Day 3: Analyzing and coding papers

Welcome back and overview of today’s lessons
Discussion and feedback from Tuesday’s self-study tasks
Lecture 4: Reading and analyzing papers
Summary from day 1: The different types of literature reviews with examples
- Focus of reviews

What and how to analyze?
- Bibliographic and other objective information
- Method and specific techniques, data levels, theory and concepts, findings, suggestions for future studies
- Concept centric tables
- PRISMA - Paolo
- Identifying gaps and arguing for their relevance
- Synthesizing findings and theoretical concepts
- Mapping theoretical relationships
Exercise (pairwise)
Participants read and code different aspects of an academic paper
Plenary summary

Lunch

Lecture 5. Problematization as methodology for generating research questions
- Alvesson & Sandberg

Lecture 6: Tools and techniques for coding and documenting

Spreadsheet / manual coding
Template analysis
Software (Atlas, Nvivo, MaxQDA)
Parsifal
AI-tools

Coffee Break

Exercise: Planning your analysis
- Participants create their extraction form and motivate their rationale

Summary Day 3 and outline of self-study tasks for Day 4

Day 4 - Self-study: Analyzing and coding papers

Day 4. Self-study: Analyzing and coding papers

ITU
Participants continue reading and coding papers

Day 5 - Writing and publishing a literature review

Day 5: Writing and publishing a literature review

Welcome back and overview of today’s lessons
Discussion and feedback from Thursday’s self-study tasks
Lecture 7: Planning the writing process
- Get to know your outlet
  - Deciding on the outlet
  - Obtain and assess author guidelines, paper template etc.
  - Read exemplary papers and literature reviews from selected outlet and research field
  - Dialogue with the editor / track chairs about review
Lecture 8: Experiences from conducting a literature review – Guest lecturer Aske Halling, Aarhus University

Lunch
Pairwise Exercise: Identify literature reviews from a relevant outlet, skim the reviews for structure and read the abstract and discuss with fellow students
Exercise: Create an outline for your presentation of your review (manuscript draft)

Lecture 9: Collaborating on reviews:
- Finding people to work with
- Making an initial agreement (also covered by research code of conduct course)
- Making a codebook and calculating intercoder reliability
- Planning the work and working together
- Ensuring progress and ending the collaboration
Summary Day 3 and group discussions

Course evaluation

Readings:

Reading list

Reading list:

Alvesson, M., & Sandberg, J. (2011). Generating research questions through problematization. Academy of management review, 36(2), 247-271.

*Alvesson, M., & Sandberg, J. (2013). Constructing research questions: Doing interesting research.

Boell, S. K., & Cecez-Kecmanovic, D. (2014). A hermeneutic approach for conducting literature reviews and literature searches. Communications of the Association for information Systems, 34(1), 12.

Brereton, P., Kitchenham, B. A., Budgen, D., Turner, M., & Khalil, M. (2007). Lessons from applying the systematic literature review process within the software engineering domain. Journal of systems and software, 80(4), 571-583.

Brocke, J. V., Simons, A., Niehaves, B., Niehaves, B., Reimer, K., Plattfaut, R., & Cleven, A. (2009). Reconstructing the giant: On the importance of rigour in documenting the literature search process.

* How to do a literature review. This IS research. https://open.spotify.com/episode/4Q4mmjjij0OsmYBwMBGIn

* Khatib, K. A., Højgaard, K. F., Veileborg, B., Andersen, C. R., Hansen, C. H. O., Nielsen, S. S., & Nicolaisen, J. (2023). Mellem hylderne - en podcast af KP Bibliotek: #4: Videnskabelig litteratur i opgaven. Podcast, music and sound productions, Københavns Professionshøjskole. https://bibliotek.kp.dk/kp/studerende/podcast

Kitchenham, B., & Charters, S. (2007). Guidelines for performing systematic literature reviews in software engineering.

Kitchenham, B. (2004). Procedures for undertaking systematic reviews: Joint technical report. Computer Science Department, Keele University (TR/SE-0401) and National ICT Australia Ltd.(0400011T. 1).

Mathiassen, L. (2017). Designing engaged scholarship: From real-world problems to research publications. Engaged Management Review, 1(1), 2.

* Nicolaisen, Jeppe (2023) Sådan finder du videnskabelig litteratur. Databaser og informationssøgning. Hans Reitzels Forlag.

Sandberg, J., & Alvesson, M. (2011). Ways of constructing research questions: gap-spotting or problematization?. Organization, 18(1), 23-44.

Webster, J., & Watson, R. T. (2002). Analyzing the past to prepare for the future: Writing a literature review. MIS quarterly, xiii-xxiii.

Exemplary literature reviews (preliminary list):

Bardram, J. E., Jeuris, S., Tell, P., Houben, S., & Voida, S. (2019). Activity-centric computing systems. Communications of the ACM, 62(8), 72-81.

Giuffrida, R., & Dittrich, Y. (2013). Empirical studies on the use of social software in global software development–A systematic mapping study. Information and Software Technology, 55(7), 1143-1164.

Halling, A., & Baekgaard, M. (2024). Administrative Burden in Citizen–State Interactions: A Systematic Literature Review. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 34(2), 180-195.

Lindgren, I., Madsen, C. Ø., Hofmann, S., & Melin, U. (2019). Close encounters of the digital kind: A research agenda for the digitalization of public services. Government Information Quarterly, 36(3), 427-436.

Lous, P., Kuhrmann, M., & Tell, P. (2017, May). Is scrum fit for global software engineering?. In 2017 IEEE 12th International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE) (pp. 1-10). IEEE.

Kitchenham, B., Pretorius, R., Budgen, D., Brereton, O. P., Turner, M., Niazi, M., & Linkman, S. (2010). Systematic literature reviews in software engineering–a tertiary study. Information and software technology, 52(8), 792-805.

Madsen, C. Ø., & Kræmmergaard, P. (2015, August). Channel choice: A literature review. In International Conference on Electronic Government (pp. 3-18). Springer, Cham.

Mustafee, N. (2011). Evolution of IS research based on literature published in two leading IS journals-EJIS and MISQ.

Nielsen, M. E., Østergaard Madsen, C., & Lungu, M. F. (2020, August). Technical Debt Management: A systematic literature review and research agenda for digital government. In International Conference on Electronic Government (pp. 121-137). Springer, Cham.

Theocharis, G., Kuhrmann, M., Münch, J., & Diebold, P. (2015, December). Is water-scrum-fall reality? on the use of agile and traditional development practices. In International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement (pp. 149-166). Springer, Cham.

Zhang, H., Babar, M. A., & Tell, P. (2011). Identifying relevant studies in software engineering. Information and Software Technology, 53(6), 625-637.

* References marked with * are optional

Credits:

3 ECTS

Amount of hours the student is expected to use on the course:

Preparation: 30 hours (reading and prepare presentation of Ph.D. project)

Participation: 30 hours (including self-study at the Royal Library)

Exam: Writing a plan for the literature review (25 hours)

How to sign up:

Students who wish to participate in the course must send an e-mail to Christian Madsen (chrm@itu.dk). The e-mail must include a brief cover letter (1 page) which presents their Ph.D. project, the research field the Ph.D. project is positioned towards, and ideas for a literature review. During the first day of the course the students will present their co-students’ projects to each other using these descriptions.

The deadline for signing up is: Friday September 5^th.