I want to reproduce the following table for my bachelorthesis (Taxonomy for literature review cf. Cooper):
My first attempt was to create a table using multicolumn from the multirow
package. I used 15 columns, so that the "Characteristic" column equals 3 columns and the 12 columns left in each row are good for 3 items in a row (equals multicolumn of 4) and 4 items (equals multicolumn of 3).
So my first approch to produce the rows for (1) and (2) was:
\usepackage{multirow}
\definecolor{gray}{RGB}{224,224,224}
\begin{figure}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|c|}
\hline
\multicolumn{3}{|>{\columncolor{gray}}c|}{focus} &
\multicolumn{3}{|>{\columncolor{gray}}c|}{research outcomes} &
\multicolumn{3}{|>{\columncolor{gray}}c|}{research methods} &
\multicolumn{3}{|>{\columncolor{gray}}c|}{theories} &
\multicolumn{3}{|>{\columncolor{gray}}c|}{applications}\\
\hline
\multicolumn{3}{|>{\columncolor{gray}}c|}{goal} &
\multicolumn{4}{|>{\columncolor{gray}}c|}{integration} &
\multicolumn{4}{|>{\columncolor{gray}}c|}{critisism} &
\multicolumn{4}{|>{\columncolor{gray}}c|}{central issues}\\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\caption{Test}
\label{fig:test}
\end{figure}
Which produced
I also tried the same using the tabularx environment, which gave me strange results.
Is there a good possibility to produce this table using multicolumns?