Project Management: Skills and training
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In addition to your course, the Library offers online resources, courses and workshops to help you develop your information literacy. Details of scheduled events are in the How to... ? section of the Bringing your library to you guide.
Effective Information Searching
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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Literature reviews
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 Babaei et al. (2021) and Daemi et al. (2021)) which adopt the processes of Tranfield et al. (2003) or Briner and Denyer (2012) in producing their literature reviews:
The key steps in building a systematic review consist of:
I. Planning the review
- Identify the need.
- Specify your research question.
- Develop the review protocol.
II. Conducting a review
- Identify research
- Select studies
- Quality assessment
- Data extraction
- Data synthesis
III. Reporting and dissemination of the review
- Specify dissemination mechanisms.
- Format the report.
Tutorials with your specialist librarian
With access to millions of resources, sometimes the library can seem like an intimidating place. Our specialist Librarians are here to help you make sense of it all by providing in-depth guidance and support in your chosen subject area.
James Dean is the Librarian supporting the Computing, Engineering and Built Environment (CEBE) faculty. James offers tutorials either face-to-face or online via MS Teams.