Build theory with literature reviews
In the Fall semester of 2015, while I was an associate professor at Concordia University, Montreal, ICT University invited me to give a series of online guest lectures as part of their doctoral student course on how to carry out a literature review. ICT University is based in Yaoundé, Cameroun and Baton Rouge, USA. Its programs focus primarily on information and communication technologies and on management.
I recorded most of the lectures and now I have edited them to be suitable for a more general audience. Although the lectures were given in the context of a specific course, these edited videos should be suitable for any researcher or graduate student who would like to learn how to develop theory using literature reviews.
Contents
Course overview
This first video is the overview to the course that I presented to the ICT University students. It provides a general introduction to literature reviews and the idea of developing theory using literature reviews.
- Course outline
- Here are the two articles I refer to:
1. Objectives
The first step to building theory with literature reviews is to determines the objectives of your theory-mining review. This video defines literature reviews and then explains what theory means and why it is important. Then it introduces theory-mining reviews (TMRs) and explains the three types of TMR.
2. Protocol
The second step to building theory with literature reviews is to carefully plan the entire study with a research protocol and to train the review team. This video describes the protocol, how to train the team, and how to conduct a pilot study literature review.
Unfortunately, the audio for the original recording was lost, and so this video is just a short review of the original class session that briefly recaps each point.
3. Practical screen
The third step to building theory with literature reviews is to explicitly define the practical screen, that is, the criteria for including or excluding studies in the review. This video describes practical screen criteria from the perspective of building theory and also gives some practical tips.