The eligibility criteria are the 'rules' for what studies or articles are eligible to be included in your review as data sources. In other words, you are defining what literature you will critically appraise and extract data from in order to address your review question.
By defining an eligibility criteria, you create a list of required study characteristics, enabling you to better identify the studies that can provide useful evidence to fulfill the review's objective.
Eligibility criteria are typically divided into inclusion, and exclusion characteristics:
Inclusion Criteria: What are the characteristics that studies must have in order to be included in the review?
Exclusion Criteria: What are the characteristics that would make a study ineligible to be included in the review?
Consider:
Also see: Inclusion and exclusion criteria (LibGuides - University of Melbourne)
For a review whose objective is to "undertake an integrative assessment of contemporary evidence on how emergency nurses cope and motivate themselves to sustain their caring work", the following eligibility criteria was outlined.
| Criteria | Include if: | Exclude if: |
|---|---|---|
| Study Content (Variables of Interest) |
Reporting on population: emergency nurses Reported on phenomenon of interest: coping, motivation and/or caring practice |
Population of focus: unlicensed or unregistered emergency nurses, emergency nurse practitioners Emergency nurse or emergency department data not extractable |
| Study Designs |
Empirical research (quantitative or qualitative study designs) |
Non-research methods (e.g. editorials, commentaries, opinion/discussion papers, narrative literature reviews) |
| Publication Details |
English language Published in peer-reviewed journals Published from 2008-2021 |
Non-academic sources (newspapers, magazines, newsletters)
|
Rantung, G., Griffiths, D., Plummer, V., & Moss, C. (2022). How emergency nurses cope and motivate themselves to sustain their caring work: An integrative literature review. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 31(7–8), 843–859. https://doi.org/10.1111/jocn.16005
Some of the inclusion/exclusion criteria are used to build the database search strategy (e.g. filtering by date or language, or only using keywords/subject headings that describe the desired population). The database search criteria may not include every element of the eligibility criteria, but instead focus on a few core components in order to structure a broad search.
Once potentially relevant records have been identified using the database searches, all of the eligibility criteria are then applied ‘manually’ by the researcher during the screening process. You read titles and abstracts, and full texts of articles, and reject articles if the characteristics of the article don’t fit the eligibility criteria.