Session 1: Intro (teaching notes)

Prior knowledge of literature reviews, topics, and expectations

Activate/Show interest in topics

Get up, as, on the whiteboard what your topics are. Ask follow-up questions on the the topics.

  • What is your topic and research question for this seminar?

  • What are your expectations for the seminar?

  • Ask students to write their topics and names on the whiteboard (one after the other, writing similar topics next to each other)
  • Make sure that the topics and student interests receive enough attention
  • Ask students about their experience with literature reviews (did you work on a literature review before?)

Introduction

  • I am not an expert in all topics.
  • I have experience with the method, how to ensure a good methodological fit, how to present and develop review papers in a compelling manner.
  • Prior experience: TA for 50 PhD students from different management disciplines (12 sessions, 8 assignments, exam, protocol and presentation)

My background: phd, publications, postdoc and phd seminar, guy pare: mentor and SE, colrev, jit award

Why focus on literature review? (My family often asks me… / when will I do “real” research?)

Why literature reviews are exciting (I)

This slide is more on how LRs help us to react to rising demands (the next more on active contributions)

sheer volume of research:

  • our capacity to synthesize it will become much more important
  • our capacity to organize (make sense of prior research)
  • our capacity to scrutinize (and sort out the bad apples)

reinventing the wheel (grit - meta-analysis)

cases like the grit construct, which is basically identical with conscientiousness

retracts, papers in predatory journals, theories or methods that have shortcomings, papers that are written by tools like genAI

Why literature reviews are exciting (II)

literature review; systematic review; umbrella; meta-analysis; overview of reviews; meta-synthesis; meta-ethnography; scoping review; literature survey; Review paper; Background; State-of-the-art

Example: Media Synchronicity Theory (Dennis et al. 2006)

  • Rationale: impossible for an individual empirical study because there would be too many variables that must vary (just imagine an experiment!)
  • Especially at group/organizational levels where research designs are much more limited (no experiments)
  • Especially macro-level theories. Similarly: RBV

Protocol/Outcome

  • Set date for presentation
  • Show LR-Seminar website and the Review Protocol section with criteria/template