A critical step in conducting a review is deciding how wide to cast the net. Cooper suggests four different coverage scenarios. In an exhaustive review, the reviewer promises to locate and consider all published and unpublished research on a specific topic. Finding every piece of research, on the other hand, may take more time than is available. The key to conducting an exhaustive review is to limit the population so that the number of articles to review is manageable. Cooper (1988) describes this as a thorough review with selective citations. For example, the reviewer may choose to look only at articles published in journals and not conference papers; however, excluding conference papers should be justified theoretically.
A third approach to coverage is to look at a representative sample of articles and draw conclusions about the entire population of articles from that sample. Random sampling, on the other hand, is far from perfect. A potentially more certain approach is to collect evidence demonstrating that the representative sample is, in fact, representative.The best strategy may be to do both.
Cooper's fourth article selection strategy is to use a purposive sample in which the reviewer looks only at the most important or pivotal articles in a field. The key here is to persuade the reader that the articles chosen are, in fact, the central or pivotal articles in a field, and, more importantly, that the articles that were not chosen are not central or pivotal.
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