Opportunities and challenges in conjoining scholarly quality ideals and institutional transparency measures: A systematic literature review

Introduction
We conducted a systematic literature review to investigate how notions of quality are conceptualised in academic articles on qualitative research methodology. The research question was: Which key topics around research quality can be identified in social sciences papers that focus on qualitative research methodology?

Goals and Methods
Through the systematic review we investigated how quality ideals are constructed and what major contemporary developments can be observed in this regard. The review was conducted based on a search query on Scopus among articles published between 2017 and October 2023 that fall within Scopus’ “Social Sciences” category. We made a selection of 446 articles from which a random sample of 111 articles was drawn. This sample was analysed through manual coding in Atlas TI.

Results
We found both established quality ideals and topical developments that alter the practices of qualitative researchers. Regarding the former, it came as no surprise that among the articles in our sample diversity of approaches, participant wellbeing, or self-reflexivity are highly valued. As to the latter, we found that transparency aspects such as data sharing, archiving, and curation receive emergent attention by researchers, universities, funders, and journals alike.

Conclusions
We aim to overcome the often-polarised mode of discussion in which transparency measures or standardisation in general are viewed as a (post)positivist imposition on qualitative researchers. That is, we believe that emergent practices in the realm of transparency, archiving, and data curation can aid qualitative researchers in refining and diversifying their source material, and thus their research insights. For this, we are inspired by articles in our sample that share or reuse qualitative data sets, as these successfully advance ideals of the qualitative research community through innovative data curation and sharing practices.