A Systematic Review of Barriers to Accessing Undergraduate Research for STEM Students: Problematizing Under-Researched Factors for Students of Color
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
I thought this was a rigorous well-written study I only have 3 comments.
The study is contexualised within the US, please make it clear if the research articles reviewed related to the global context or only the US context. If they were global how were the different social groups conceptualised? For example would black British students be included in the review? Another example would be that data from South Africa may be different and social groups defined in a different way. So how would these global variances be resolved?
Please give a concrete example(s) of what stem undergraduate research looks like and again is this dependant on national context?
Please give acronyms in full when first mentioning them for example eg STEM and GPA.
I think these are easily resolved and look forward to seeing this paper published.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
Barriers to Accessing Undergraduate Research for STEM Students of Color: A Systematic Review
General recommendations
The manuscript is related to a systematic review of the barriers to accessing undergraduate research for STEM students. It has some methodological and structural deficits. The following recommendations and critics are presented:
1- The most controversial issue that arises methodologically in the study is the expansion of the focus of the study from "students of color" to "all undergraduate students". The expectation of a reader reading the title will be to include the findings with "students of color" in the findings. But the findings are relevant to "all students".
2-The studies reached during the development of the themes are related to underrepresented groups. But the studies in which the themes are applied are studies that include all students. Could different themes have emerged if the searches had been expanded to include all students during the development phase of the study? We can't say definitely no. For this reason, we are examining the structural studies with the "inadequate measuring tool".
3- When the first and second items are evaluated together, the part of the study from the title to the conclusion should be revised.
4-Although the publications up to 2017 were examined in the collection of data, the discussion part should be enriched with more recent studies.
Author Response
Response to Reviewer 1 Comments
Point 1: The most controversial issue that arises methodologically in the study is the expansion of the focus of the study from "students of color" to "all undergraduate students". The expectation of a reader reading the title will be to include the findings with "students of color" in the findings. But the findings are relevant to "all students".
Response 1: Thank you for pointing that out. It prompted us to improve our title to more accurately reflect the trajectory of our review. The new title is, “A Systematic Review of Barriers to Accessing Undergraduate Research for STEM Students: Problematizing Under-researched Factors for Students of Color” in addition to the changes described in point 2, below.
Point 2: The studies reached during the development of the themes are related to underrepresented groups. But the studies in which the themes are applied are studies that include all students. Could different themes have emerged if the searches had been expanded to include all students during the development phase of the study? We can't say definitely no. For this reason, we are examining the structural studies with the "inadequate measuring tool". When the first and second items are evaluated together, the part of the study from the title to the conclusion should be revised.
Response 2: Thank you for this sage advice. We have added this paragraph in the methods, “We acknowledge the novelty of these methods described above and recognize that we could be creating a methodological weakness by applying the ten categories of barriers for students of color that we identified in the preliminary nonstructured literature review in the structured literature review around experiences for all students in STEM. That is, we may have inadvertently failed to explore additional barriers that STEM students across demographic categories experience. At the same time, we think this paper’s offerings are still meaningful in illuminating an important set of potential barriers for all students, with newly offered implications for under-researched factors for STEM students of color. Given what we know about additional barriers for underserved groups in STEM and the national imperative to diversify STEM disciplines, we contend a methodology like ours, even with its potential limitations, allows for considerations of barriers that urgently need to be explored. We do recommend that future research examines additional factors that we may not have considered due to our methodology.”
We reiterate the need for this future research in the discussion section: “Thus, we engaged in a methodology that applied categories of barriers for students of color that we identified in the preliminary nonstructured literature review to a structured literature review around experiences for all students in STEM. Again, we may have not identified all barriers to accessing research for STEM students and recommend future research allowing for identification of additional barriers for all STEM students.”
Point 3: Although the publications up to 2017 were examined in the collection of data, the discussion part should be enriched with more recent studies.
Response 3: A new paragraph was added to discussion section 4.1 to enrich the article with more recent studies: “This review explored articles about student barriers to participating in undergraduate research experiences up through 2017. While there was a lack of focus on barriers for STEM students of color identified in this review, we are encouraged to see more recent work exploring challenges that students of color may face when accessing opportunities for undergraduate research. For example, several scholars have recently begun to investigate barriers to fieldwork, an integral aspect of many undergraduate research experiences, and how these barriers disproportionately impact, and serve to exclude, students of color (e.g., Giles, Jackson, & Stephen, 2020; Morales et al., 2020). In another recent study, scholars found that 60% of respondents who “strongly agreed” that research is only for future scientists were Latinx, revealing a need to promote the importance of the undergraduate research experience as an inclusive tool for learning, growth, and belonging for all students, regardless of career trajectory (Amaya et al., 2018). These are promising steps forward as we work toward a more holistic picture of barriers to accessing undergraduate research for STEM students of color.” We have also added “Given the limitations of these search dates, we situate our findings in articles published post-2017 in the discussion section” into the methods section.
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper revised based on my suggestions and others. Congrats
Author Response
Response to Editor Comments (August 21, 2021)
Point 1: The main problem with this paper is that it proposes to address barriers to STEM among students of color, but the articles reviewed do not address barriers that students of color per se confront. Is it that the barriers identified are more pronounced for disadvantaged groups? Barriers (and the lack of research) for STEM students of color appears in the discussion, but the rest of the paper seems to say little about students of color, except in the Non-Structured Literature Review where the 10 barriers to STEM are identified. Again the paper is quite long and could be streamlined into a shorter more concise assessment of barriers to STEM education confronted by students of color. A restructuring of the paper would help. For example, implications of the identified barriers to undergrad research are discussed in separate places (section 3.4, p. 20; section 4, the discussion; and section 5, Implications). Couldn't this information be integrated into one section that highlights the main implications identified in the research articles? In sum, this is a good paper and thorough review of barriers to STEM research opportunities for undergrads, but needs a bit of restructuring.
Response 1: We are very grateful for this feedback from the editor on our paper. The editor highlights concerns about the fact that we initially planned to explore barriers to accessing undergraduate research for students of color in STEM but had to expand the study to include barriers for all STEM students. We were forced to make this methodological decision because our systematic review did not result in articles exploring barriers for STEM students of color specifically. This in itself was an interesting (and concerning) finding that we wanted to highlight in our article. As you know, like most research, structured literature reviews can take unexpected turns. Ours certainly did. However, we have accounted for the methodological concerns associated with these unexpected turns by offering additional text throughout the article to clarify why our methodological decisions were made and why they should not discount the value of our findings. We feel this paper’s offerings are still meaningful in illuminating an important set of barriers for STEM students and highlight the importance of interrogating systems and practices that may prevent STEM students of color, in particular, from getting involved in research. As we point out in this article, this is a critically underexplored area of scholarship.
The editor also highlights concerns that implications of the identified barriers to undergraduate research are addressed in separate places and could be streamlined to shorten the article. The implications section that begins on page 20 reports findings from our third research question, “What implications were outlined for overcoming barriers to undergraduate research experiences for students?” In this section, we synthesize the implications laid out by the authors of the research articles we reviewed in this study. In other words, we are still reporting results from our analysis in this section. We save our own narrative of the implications of our study, more broadly, for the implications section at the very end. We appreciate you noticing that some implications did show up in the discussion section. We have restructured the discussion section by deleting several paragraphs that may have appeared repetitive or too closely resembling implications (see tracked changes). We have also restructured parts of the implications sections to shorten it where possible (again, see tracked changes). Again, we thank you for your consideration of this article.
