Use Case: Using NVivo for Literature Reviews
Sometimes, it is helpful to see how others have used NVivo to understand some of its possible applications. This page summarizes a basic “use case” of using this qualitative data analytics tool for a literature review ("lit review"). A literature review provides an extensive background for a research topic by evaluating the formal published writing from that informational domain.
This is a brief summary article, with the described capabilities addressed in more depth elsewhere in this e-book. (Please reference the specific capabilities in the left menu bar.) Suffice it to say that NVivo is a complex and capable software tool, and going into too much detail here might lead to more confusion than illumination. Also, this article is not a comprehensive summary of the tool’s main functions in this use case but mentions five applications. First, what is a literature review?
What is a "Literature Review" / "Review of the Literature"?
A “literature review” is a selective summary of the state-of-the-art of a particular topic, through referencing the academic research literature. While this review should draw from a comprehensive set of secondary (published) research, it is necessarily selective and focused. (By contrast, a meta-analysis is a more formalized review of the literature based on a defined set of standards for inclusion of the published research in the review. There are both quantitative and qualitative versions of meta-analyses. In general, meta-analyses are conducted to identify some consensus findings from research at the macro level...to identify research-based fact patterns...address open questions in a field, and other objectives.)
Why are literature reviews conducted? Literature reviews inform researchers of the work that has been done to explore related topics, especially (1) research methods and (2) research findings. Researchers who want to pursue study in that area would do well to know what came before, so they can design research that builds effectively to that context.
These reviews are used to set contexts for future research because virtually all new research builds on prior research and extends the learning from prior research. There is less value in reiterating prior research although there is space for testing prior models and prior research for validity. (This is where reproducible research is an important aspect of research work.)
Literature reviews are important for the following:
- master's theses
- doctoral dissertations
- academic publishing
- general research
- and others
To clarify, a literature review generally pursues study in the published secondary research literature. This is not to say that there is not value in the “gray literature” or less formal writing—such as formal reports that are released by organizations or companies (but not through an editorial process in a book or magazine publisher context). Beyond gray literature, there is also a lot of informal sources, such as shared slideshows, social media data, user-generated videos, social imagery, and other data that may be valuable.
Standards and Expectations for Literature Reviews
Various fields have differing standards and expectations for literature reviews. Some essential standards are the following:
- full saturation (comprehensive data capture of all related sources);
- clear evolution of the field up to the present (with main points of advancement);
- understanding of the main points of controversy in the field;
- identification of the main theorists in the field and their main concepts and insights;
- full respected research approaches (and standards);
- identification of research instruments (with high validity and high reliability);
- professional ethical practices in the field;
- clear citations (for findability); and most critically,
- where the main gaps are in the literature and what the most cutting-edge research questions are (to help researchers acquire a sense of what they should explore).
A literature review is rarely done in a linear way. The work involves recursion because as one source is explored, it may well reveal other sources, other researchers, and other methods. A “snowball” approach may lead to other sources, until saturation is fully achieved.
Using Third-Party Web-based Bibliography Tools
NVivo has integrations with Citavi, Mendeley, EndNote, Zotero, and RefWorks. These web-based bibliography tools enable the full download of .pdf sources from databases (including subscription ones) and the connected metadata from those sources for easy mark-up in NVivo and for full informed data tables of metadata for each source.
NVivo for Literature Reviews
How can NVivo be used to enhance a literature review?
Application 1: Digital data curation
First, if a literature review contains a lot of information, an NVivo project may be effectively deployed to help curate the digital data. An NVivo project functions like a "database" for semi-structured data, enabling a user to archive and find various sources (through text searches and other methods). Semi-structured data (sometimes referred to as unstructured data) refers to data that is not pre-labeled in a data table; these include imagery, audio, video, and so on. Uploaded sources may be linked to their respective source citations as well, if that citation functionality is available through a third-party citation tool like EndNote, Mendeley, Refworks, and Zotero.
Application 2: Multimedia and notes (and memos)
Another application is to use NVivo to integrate various forms of multimedia and to link text transcripts and memos and coding to these multimedia objects, including datasets, audio, imagery, and video files. Because the data queries and autocoding functions in NVivo are based on text, all multimedia will have to have a complete text version in order to function correctly.
Application 3: Extraction of main themes and subthemes from the literature review
NVivo enables users to extract themes and subthemes from sources, for an initial automated “read” of the research. This is done through an autocoding topic-modeling approach. (This capability is part of NVivo, on Windows, not any other version of this tool.)
It is also possible to expand manual coding of the researcher using the “coding by existing pattern” function.
Application 4: Bounding the set of secondary-source data
If there is a wide range of possible items to read for a literature review, it is possible to first let the computer do an early “distant reading” of the contents. The rows would be each of the sources, and the columns would be particular phrases or words of interest (based on an autocoded extraction of themes). The resulting intensity matrix would show which readings might be of most interest because of the recurrence of the particular terms of interest in that work. This may help bound the set of articles which the researcher would engage with close reading.
Application 5: Capturing summary data of collected information
Finally, a fifth “use case” application for the literature review would be the ability to summarize data from the stored sources in an NVivo project. Summary data may be captured using data queries (such as text frequency counts and clustering analyses, among others). This summary view may provide a general sense of where the field is at a particular time and where researchers are focused.
And there are many more practical use cases within the review of the literature and other applications. (Never be limited by the limits of the presenter.)
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