How to Organize My Ppaper for a Book Review

Kathleen Clarke is a Ph.D. candidate in Higher Didactics at the Academy of Toronto. You tin follow her on Twitter @_KathleenClarke where she tweets well-nigh graduate education, mental wellness, and disability.

There are many different types of reference managers, including Refworks, Zotero, Endnote, and Mendeley. I've tried them all and none of take stuck. Information technology's not that there is anything incorrect with them; I know folks who swear by them. They just don't suit my workflow. Instead, I use a simple spreadsheet (Excel and/or Google Sheets) and a numbering format to go along track of all my resources. The best part near my arrangement: it doesn't crave buying any software and information technology doesn't take hours to learn!

The Major Spreadsheet

In her post chosen "How I Apply Excel to Manage My Literature Review," Elaine Campbell outlines her approach to using a spreadsheet to manage literature. I call her approach the Major Spreadsheet, because she is mapping out a very large body of literature for her doctorate in a single spreadsheet. I started a like spreadsheet very early in my plan. Here's what it looks like:

What you want to do is add a agglomeration of column headings for things you lot desire to go along track of so offset adding resources to each row. I initially was merely adding periodical articles, but realized this would work better if it truly housed all my resources. I therefore add anything related to my work: books, policies, blog posts.

Here are two pointers for your Major Spreadsheet:

Starting time, kickoff early on and add often. I add to my Major Spreadsheet whenever I come across an commodity pertinent to my research area (graduate students with mental wellness challenges and disabilities). I started this in the start year of my program, so I have quite a few articles now. As Campbell points out in her post, this approach is great considering it can assistance y'all see how far y'all've come and how much you've read.

2nd, headings. The cute matter well-nigh workflow and organization is that in that location is no correct way to do it; you can customize annihilation. The headings of your spreadsheet are where you tin make this your own. In my spreadsheet, I have:

• ID number (I'll come up dorsum to this)
• Year
• Writer(s) + Year
• Championship
• APA Reference
• Type of Resources
• Abstruse
• Keywords
• Location (Canada, United States, Uk, Other)
• Purpose/Objectives
• Research Questions
• Survey/Interview/Focus Grouping Questions
• Sample
• Quantitative/Qualitative Design
• Main Findings
• Notes (where I put quotations I might want to utilize)

Some of these headings may not be of interest to you, merely you are complimentary to add whatever feature or metric you may want to use as a filter or sorting characteristic. These headings can change, too. Equally yous go on y'all tin add or remove as you run into fit. Yous also want to retrieve about the themes yous might write about in your literature review. I, for example, take headings like: prevalence, stressors, low, anxiety, suicide, accommodations, counseling, disclosure, faculty perceptions, and stigma. When an article I'k adding addresses one of these in a research question or as a finding, I add together a picayune x in the cell to evidence that. Then, when I'm writing about that topic, I sort the cavalcade and so that I can easily pull all the manufactures that address that theme.

The Pocket-size Spreadsheets

In addition to my Major Spreadsheet, I also developed what I call Minor Spreadsheets, which are similar to what Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega writes about in his post called Synthesizing different bodies of piece of work in your literature review: The conceptual synthesis Excel dump technique. Minor Spreadsheets are much smaller than my Major Spreadsheet and have more specific details. I use Minor Spreadsheets in two unlike ways.

Offset, in the motion-picture show of my spreadsheets from to a higher place you'll meet at the bottom that I have different sheets within the aforementioned workbook. These are manufactures that could be related to other work I want to do. For example, I have a sheet nearly international students, where I rail all the literature concerning international students' mental health. I likewise accept a canvass with cool studies that I want to come back to later on (because who said reviewing literature can't be fun?). I add to these sheets on an ongoing basis to salvage me time subsequently.

The second fashion I use Minor Spreadsheets is when I start a new paper. I pull manufactures from my Major Spreadsheet and throw them in a new one. Now that I have an existing foundation for the literature, I can become to Google Scholar to build on what I already accept instead of starting from scratch.

These Minor Spreadsheets are typically much more focused than my Major Spreadsheet. For example, in the Major Spreadsheet I employ the x to identify articles nether i overarching disability theme and in the Minor Spreadsheet I accept all these and await more than closely at type of disability, level of teaching, and accommodations.

The Number Arrangement

Now, lots of folks would use the spreadsheet approach and and then store their articles with annotations in another programme. Instead, I include a number arrangement that allows me to easily observe whatsoever article from my Major/Minor Spreadsheets from a regular folder in my Documents (Shout out to Jeff Couch for introducing me to this method). If y'all look dorsum at the screenshot I provided earlier, you'll run across that there is a column called ID Number. Every commodity I add to my Major or Pocket-sized Spreadsheets gets an ID number. I then have a folder for my Major Spreadsheet and all its articles.

My binder for my Major Spreadsheet looks like this:

Everything is prissy and clean with the numbers, only it doesn't always await like this. Hither's an instance of what one of my Minor Spreadsheets, Canadian articles, looks similar:

For my Modest Spreadsheets, I typically start past copying and pasting articles from the Major Spreadsheet and the folder of manufactures. This is why you stop upwards with folders for Minor Spreadsheets where the numbers are all over the place, which is okay. The numbers don't mean anything; information technology's just an piece of cake way to find manufactures other than using writer name(s) and article titles.

A final notation: I number dissertations differently than other pieces. I started numbering those at 1000 and take gone up from in that location. I wanted to differentiate dissertations in some way then that I could hands find them in my folders (commonly considering I expect at dissertations to see how others have washed certain things). You could also differentiate other pieces in your folder similar books, by starting at 2000, for instance. Again, you can customize all of this to what works for you lot.

I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this spreadsheet approach and to also know what other methods you might be using to organize your literature. Do you call back the spreadsheet approach would piece of work for you? What other methods do you lot use to organize your literature review work?

[Image by Flickr user Craig Chew-Moulding and used under Creative Commons licensing.]

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Source: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/gradhacker/organizing-your-literature-spreadsheet-style

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