Evaluating the Literature

Even while you are searching and gathering papers, you will be evaluating whether each paper is relevant to your research question and inclusion criteria. It’s also a good idea to keep your eyes open for patterns that can help you make your search even more complete and to organize your findings afterwards. If you can get an idea of what the main issues being debated are, and the different methods and conclusions being promoted, this can help you to read systematically, take notes, and more easily keep track of what you want to say in your final paper. Your professor will give you much more advice on how to analyze papers in your field and what to focus on in terms of their content, but here are some tips for things you can take notes on for later.

1. Note the definitions of key terms that you can use to better understand, search for, and describe your findings
2. Note informative statistics you can use in your own summary at the beginning of your paper
3. Save brief but interesting excerpts that you can use as quotations (but not too many!)
4. Keep an eye out for strengths, weaknesses, unproven assertions, and gaps in the literature
5. Note when papers mention each other, and if some authors are working on the same teams or wrote multiple papers on the topic
6. What biases or limitations (too few willing research subjects, funding problems, messy data, etc.) are the authors struggling with?
7. Is the research being conducted internationally, or are some researchers ignoring the work of others outside their own country?
8. You get the idea!

(Some list items adapted from Galvan, 2017, Chapter 5)

Organizing the Literature

You have seen it mentioned multiple times to keep good notes of your search process and your findings, but how? Before computers, students had to make do with notebooks and boxes of index cards they would use to file citations in alphabetical order. For small projects, some students still prefer paper notebooks, note apps, or a simple Word document with lists of their notes and citations copied from various databases. This can get cumbersome with larger projects like a literature review, however. Some students create spreadsheets in Excel or Google Sheets to organize their thoughts, and these can be helpful if your analytical process involves sorting papers into categories.

A big timesaver compared to doing all your citations manually, however, is to use a specialized citation manager app. I recommend Zotero, because:

1. It works on Windows, Mac, and Linux equally well
2. It’s reliable and can be trusted with your valuable research data for years to come
3. They have plugins for Microsoft Word, LibreOffice, and Google Docs (see https://www.zotero.org/support/google_docs)
4. It’s free

There are other citation managers out there, but many of them have had functionality issues that make them annoying to use, or they cost too much. (If you are a hardcore Mac user, you might be interested in Papers, though. I hear it’s good, but I don’t have a Mac, so I have never tried it personally.)

Here’s a great tutorial on getting started with Zotero. It takes a little setup and learning how to use it, but it will save  you so much time later when you are sorting through a hundred papers trying to remember which is which. Plus it makes saving articles from databases a breeze. It’s also great for taking notes on what you read, since they added a built-in PDF reader and notes feature since this video was made.