Project Management: Skills and training

For postgraduate MSc. Project Management students, searching skills are introduced as a practical activity in your Research Methods module, ENG7142. They are also included in the BNV7200 Individual Master's Project module as part of the MSc. Construction Project Management.

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Designing a critical literature review in project management research is covered by Tong and Thomson in their chapter within Pasian (2015) Designs, Methods and Practices for Research of Project Management, pp. 153-171.

There are three key journals dedicated to project management research: 
1. International Journal of Project Management
2. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business
3. Project Management Journal.

These 3 journals “represent the main body of research in project studies” (Stingl and Geraldi, 2017: 123). You can restrict your search just to these 3 key journals. This is the approach taken by literature reviews such as Aarseth et al. (2017); Derakhshan et al. ( 2019); and Martinsuo and Hoverfalt (2019).

However, your review may cover specific aspects of project management within industries such as construction, IT and software or the oil and gas industry. In this case, you will need to follow recent reviews in project management (such as Alzoubi et al. (2023) and De Almeida et al. (2023)) which adopted the processes of Tranfield et al. (2003) or Briner and Denyer (2012) in producing their literature reviews.

Some systematic literature reviews in management have started to follow the advice in Sauer and Seurer (2023) who took the advice from 13 previous guidelines and synthesised this into six stages and 14 decisions.

Their six stages in the systematic literature review process are:

1. Defining the research question

• Specify the research gap and research question(s).
• Opt for a theoretical approach (inductive, abductive or deductive).
• Define the core theoretical framework and constructs.

2. Determine the required characteristics of primary studies

• Specify inclusion and exclusion criteria.

3. Retrieve a sample of potentially relevant literature

• Defining sources and databases used.
• Defining search terms and crafting a search string.

4. Select the pertinent literature

• Including and excluding studies for further analysis and synthesis.

5. Synthesizing the literature

• Select a data extraction tool.
• Coding against pre-defined constructs.
• Ensuring validity and reliability.

6. Reporting the results (as specified in the assignment brief)

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