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HARIDUSTEADUSED Tallinna Ülikooli üliõpilaste 2015/2016. õppeaasta PARIMAD TEADUSTÖÖD / Artiklite kogumik
– it is currently supported and new versions are continuously being developed – this was necessary to guarantee full functionality and to access customer support if necessary (e.g. when encountering technical issues);
– it has a su cient amount of documentation and help materials available – this was needed to guarantee that guidelines existed on how to use the so ware;
– it is available on both windows and mac os X operating systems.
Based on all these criteria, NVivo was chosen as the most suitable tool to carry out the review. Although the purpose of NVivo is to allow researchers to analyse data objects and code them, this could also be expanded to other stages of the literature review. For example, the quality assessment was initially planned to be conducted by using a form tool, such as Google Forms. However, it soon became obvious that the coding system in NVivo could also be used to conduct the quality assessment. is was done simply by coding each publication with the quality assessment criteria it possessed.
Discussions with other researchers revealed that the common approach to documenting data analysis results is to use an Excel spreadsheet. is can make the process of extracting data in the synthesis phase cumbersome, as connecting each code to all occurrences in di erent papers is di cult. NVivo helps researchers tackle this issue by generating reports for each code. ese reports contain direct references to every place in a publication from where a code was derived.
is functionality enabled analysing how o en a code occurred in di erent publications as well as to determine the content behind each code. Whereas inserting every occurrence of a code into a spreadsheet would be a cumbersome task, coding in NVivo proved to be seamless and convenient.
When describing various literature reviewing methodologies, di erent work methods and their requirements were listed. Although some of these requirements were simple, propositions were made on which so ware would be best suitable to use to address them. Using a vast amount of di erent applications resulted in making the reviewing process more burdening and time consuming. e hypothetical statement that employing a wide range of tools in the process of a literature review may improve its quality did not take into account the time-consuming nature of literature reviews. Although the exact time it takes to conduct a thorough literature review depends on multiple factors, it may range from weeks to months. Employing more than two so ware solutions may burden the researcher rather than assist in conducting the research.
In the case study, NVivo was employed both on Windows as well as Mac OS X operating systems. e applications di ered in terms of the user interface, functionality, as well as reliability. While the Windows application was designed similarly to O ce 365, the user interface on the OS X application stood out as being more unique. However, the OS X application proved to be slow and prone to crashes, whereas the Windows application worked without any performance issues. Another interesting di erence was that the Windows application reminded users to save their work every een minutes, had they not done so.
Another tool employed in the review was a reference manager. A reference manager was employed due to the fact that NVivo lacks functionality for extracting metadata from publications. Most publications were simply named a er the le names without proving any insight into the title or the authors in the
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