Publication Status as a Common Inclusion Criterion in Systematic Reviews

This paper critically discusses the use of publication status as a common inclusion criterion for systematic reviews, a method adopted from the field of medicine into education and media-related education studies. Two systematic reviews exploring the use of digital media in inclusive, integrative or segregated teaching settings are compared. By adding peer-reviewed grey and non-peer reviewed literature in a second review, the initial corpus of 15 studies (articles in journals with peer review) was increased by another 19 studies (without peer review). The advantages and disadvantages of including research articles with a different publication status in systematic reviews is discussed based on the comparison of both reviews. Overall, in both reviews, the focus was on individual support with digital media while teaching, especially within technology-based learning classes, mostly from a quantitative perspective. Both reviews revealed a didactic focus (learning with digital media) and hardly any study dealt with learning about digitalization.