Scopus was used to identify 150 pieces of relevant literature. These were then reduced to 70 studies by only including (i) papers appearing in journals with an impact factor cited by the Web of Science, (ii) books receiving a high level of citation on Google Scholar, and (iii) publications relevant to the topic of study.[p.2718]
COMMENT
Scholarly articles nearly always have a literature review, but the library research process is almost always invisible. It's just assumed that scholars know how to use the library. In this paper, the researchers used an expensive research database called Scopus which was almost certainly provided by an unmentioned academic library. The process of winnowing such papers is described. The authors specifically threw out papers that are not published in peer reviewed journals or scholarly books. This research strategy is good as far as it goes, but it has the potential to create a blind spot. University facilities are often managed by people who are not faculty and who therefore have no mandate to write publish. As a result, it is harder to find papers about faculties management than articles about university curriculum and teaching. If I were advising these researchers I might have suggested extending the Scopus search with citation searches on the key articles as well as reviewing the article bibliographies for relevant publications. I also might have suggested seeking out reports published by universities that were not published in journals at all.
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