Oxford LibGuides: Systematic Literature Reviews at Master's Level: Step 2: Write a plan

Writing a protocol

A protocol is a plan for your review. It can help clarify your research question, and get you thinking about the different stages of the project before you start.

Published systematic reviews register their protocols on the PROSPERO database, while scoping review protocols are often published on OSF.

You may need to change some aspects of your review later on, but it is useful to think now about your question, inclusion/exclusion criteria, and processes for screening, data extraction, and data synthesis. You may wish to discuss your protocol document with your supervisor and get their feedback.

You can use our protocol template to get you started, and view a completed example of the template below.

Inclusion and exclusion criteria

Inclusion and exclusion criteria (sometimes called eligibility criteria) are very important for your literature review.

You will use these criteria to decide which papers to include in your review, so they need to be clear, easy to apply, and cover the reasons why you would want to include or exclude a study.

When you screen your papers by looking at the full text, you will need to record the reasons why you have excluded a study, based on your list of inclusion and exclusion criteria.

They may seem very obvious to you, but it is important that they are listed so that it is transparent why you included or excluded each paper.

Some common ideas for inclusion and exclusion criteria might be:

Population: are you interested in certain age groups or people with certain conditions?
Intervention: what intervention or exposure are you looking at? You will want to exclude studies which don't use this intervention or exposure.
Outcomes: are you only interested in certain outcomes? You may want to exclude studies which don't address these outcomes.
Geography: are you only looking at UK studies or studies from a particular region or country?
Language: do you only want studies written in English or selected languages?
Date: if there has been a previous systematic review, you may only be interested in more recent papers. Or if the topic of your review is very new (e.g. AI) then you may exclude older papers.
Study type: you may want to restrict your review to just randomised controlled trials, or exclude certain study types like systematic reviews, literature reviews, or case reports. You can also choose to exclude non-peer-reviewed material like dissertations, preprints, conference abstracts, editorials and trial protocols.

See an example of inclusion and exclusion criteria in our example protocol.