Evaluation Criteria for Frameworksin E-Health Domain

摘要

Framework articles are commonly used to synthesise research literature on a topic area, and provide a thorough description and evaluation of the work done, setting directions for future research. There is a need for criteria that can both guide authors to develop comprehensive frameworks, and for reviewers to evaluate these articles, especially in complex areas such as E-Health. By assessing a representative sample of journals and databases most likely to publish E-Health framework articles, we present a set of criteria for the evaluation of framework articles and identify the most salient features for this type of publications. Our findings suggest that a "good" framework article should aid researchers in understanding the research area, have clearly defined boundary, consist of a parsimonious set of elements and have clear guidelines on what to expect for a problem within that framework. We also found that framework articles in the E-Health domain can be characterised according to their objective, comprehensiveness, relationship with the boundary of the research stream, temporal nature, elements examined and substantive output. This paper describes how we arrive at the criteria for evaluating E-Health frameworks, and illustrates how we can apply them on a specific framework.