Review Protocol

The review protocol and presentation will be weighted as follows in the overall grade: 70% for the review protocol and 30% for the presentation.

Grading Criteria

The review protocol will be evaluated with the following criteria, closely aligned with the expectations discussed during in-person sessions and modeled after standards for review protocols submitted to conferences:

  1. Fit

    • Alignment between the topic, research objectives, review type, and methodological choices.
    • Logical consistency throughout the sections of the protocol, ensuring that these elements are aligned with each other.

  2. Transparency and Systematicity

    • Clarity and completeness in the reporting of methods, including search strategy, screening criteria, data extraction, and synthesis procedures.
    • Demonstration of rigor in methodological choices, in line with the review type.

  3. Grounding in Prior Work

    • Degree to which relevant theories, related reviews, and prior research are integrated.
    • Justification for the review’s rationale based on gaps or opportunities identified in the literature.

  4. Feasibility

    • Feasibility of completing the review project, given the scope of the review and reasonable resources.
    • Evidence of pilot testing for search, screening, data extraction, and analysis to demonstrate the feasibility and the anticipated effort required to implement the methods.

  5. Contribution and Relevance

    • Potential to contribute meaningfully to academic research and/or practical applications.
    • Clarity in articulating the expected implications for the research field or areas of practice.

Protocol: Structure and Key Elements

Length: 12-15 pages of text (excluding references and appendices)

Title page information:

  • Topic
  • Title
  • Abstract (clarity)
  • Keywords

Introduction:

  • Generativity statement
  • Clear topic, phenomenon, theory
  • Explicit and appropriate rationale
  • Clear questions or objectives
  • Optional: review type
  • Expected contributions
  • Clear scope

Intermediary section (optional; note if it should be included)

Methods:

  • State type of review (justify if necessary)
  • Description of search strategy and procedures (in line with review type)
  • Description of screening criteria
  • Quality appraisal (if applicable)
  • Data extraction procedures explicit and aligned with the review type
  • Data analysis and synthesis approach described

Expected results:

  • Structure of the synthesis (first-level headings)
  • Proposed presentation of synthesis (e.g., in the form of a table or figure)

Conclusion / Short limitations, implications for research and practice

Appendix:

  • List of contributors and responsibilities (optional)
  • Timetable (mandatory)
  • List of tools and purposes (mandatory)
  • Intended registration (optional)
  • Other declarations (optional)

References (quality and completeness)

We do not expect you to complete the whole literature review, including the search, screen, data extraction, and analysis. Instead, the review protocol should demonstrate that your plans for each step are feasible and promising. To this end, it can be helpful to run the search, and to pilot-test the screen, data extraction and analysis with a few papers.

Prior work must be cited appropriately. We run a plagiarism check for all protocols.

Submission: via e-mail to gerit.wagner@uni-bamberg.de

Presentation

Length: 10-15 minutes

Resources

Template

For the protocol, you can use the template for Markdown (create repository from template), word, or adapt existing LaTeX templates.

For the presentation, you can use the PowerPoint or Marp template.

Papers

Paré, G., Wagner, G., & Prester, J. (2023). How to develop and frame impactful review articles: key recommendations. Journal of Decision Systems, 1-17. link