Blog

By Mette Bechmann

We would like to bring to your attention an article, co-authored by a member of CBS faculty, that proposes a new paradigm for systematic reviews in the supply chain management field.

Durach, C. F., Kembro, J., & Wieland, A. (2017). A New Paradigm for Systematic Literature Reviews in Supply Chain Management. Journal of Supply Chain Management, 53(4), 67–85.

The article has been selected for the Journal of Supply Chain Management Spotlight, and in this video the three authors discuss the main ramifications.

If you are interested in searching for literature reviews in general, take a look at one of our previous articles on this topic.

Please direct all queries to your liaison librarian.

Written by Joshua Kragh Bruhn

It has been a long time coming, but now the new and improved NVivo 12 is finally here.

Especially for the Mac people, this is good news, as the new upgrade has vastly improved in terms of key functionality, such as the processing and visualisation of data.

The idiosyncratic NVivo terminology has changed too, to better reflect common usage also outside the software and in that way improve navigation.

To get started with NVivo 12, simply send an e-mail from you CBS e-mail account to nvivo@cbs.dk with the subject: nvivo license request.

Please direct all queries to Joshua Kragh Bruhn or Liselotte Brandstrup

Qualitative research is a time-consuming exercise that depends on a strict methodological discipline on the part of the researcher at every step in order to ensure the required scientific rigor.

Although NVivo cannot help you map out the appropriate methodological path or indeed execute the analysis for you, the software does accommodate a wide host of research approaches and methods, from grounded theory and phenomenology over literature reviews to discourse and conversation analysis.

Furthermore, NVivo can help you organize and make sense of most types of unstructured and semi-structured text-based and multimedia data, whether of your own making (interviews, surveys, etc.) or ready-made and harvested from online platforms such as Twitter and YouTube via NCapture, a simple browser plug-in.

Through NVivo you can probe your data in a number of ways: Use the word frequency option to get an initial idea about topics discussed; run a text search to verify relevance and establish quick connections; or implement a traditional encoding regime for a deep dive into the nooks and crannies of your data.

Every semester CBS Library hosts a series of NVivo workshops that help you get off to a good start. Check out the library course calendar for more details on times and places.

By Joshua Kragh Bruhn

Preparing for a literature review can be a daunting task and requires a lot of discipline on the part of the researcher. Not only does s(he) need to apply a meaningful, rigorous, and systematic search regime but s(he) also needs to somehow test for relevance and identify trends, both mainstream and novel, in the often overwhelming population of compiled data.
In many cases researchers employ reference management software like Mendeley to assist in the research process, to store and organize relevant contents in order not to lose track and to help implement a meticulous and correct referencing practice. Exploring data, however, is above and beyond what most of these tools can help accomplish.
Enter NVivo, a software created to assist in making sense of un- or semi-structured qualitative data, broadly speaking. On top of being able to handle written or spoken words in large datasets, NVivo can also exploit demographic, or meta-, data, in a scholarly context e.g. publication year and journal, to create clusters and identify trends. Furthermore, NVivo offers a wide suit of paths to explore the data, from simple word frequency analyses through elaborate text searches to highly complex matrix queries. 

And seeing that NVivo can be made to interact with most reference management software already populated by full-text and meta-data, it is a quite straightforward procedure to bring all of this information across to NVivo and thus make use of work already performed to collect the data. Once in NVivo you can cross-tabulate contents with metadata, for instance distribution across year or publisher, topics across geographies etc. and in this way get a head-start on your literature review project.

CBS Library runs NVivo seminars on a regular basis. Check out our event calendar for more details.

Contact: Joshua Kragh Bruhn or Liselotte Brandstrup