Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria
General notes
- These are used to define articles of interest for a literature review. In terms of a workflow, they are usually determined after you establish your research question or questions and usually before thorough searching is conducted. Note: you may first need to do some initial scoping searches to understand what has been published in the field and this can help you to define appropriate criteria.
- While databases include some filtering options, eg date range and peer review filters, most inclusion or exclusion criteria are applied by the researcher as a screening process after a search is conducted. The purpose of this step is to assess the suitability of research for a literature review.
- For a search for a course-work assessment task you may only apply a few more general criteria, such as date range, peer reviewed, educational setting, eg. secondary school
- For a comprehensive literature search, many different factors can be used as inclusion or exclusion criteria.
- In some types of papers it is appropriate to describe the inclusion and exclusion criteria within a paragraph or present it as table in the methods section of your paper
The following examples have been extracted from our Systematic reviews library guide.
Note: this guide is designed to support Systematic reviews in the Health Sciences, however some of these criteria may be relevant to the social sciences and educational research or they may help you generate custom criteria
