Now that I have an existing foundation for the literature, I can go to Google Scholar to build on what I already have instead of starting from scratch. I pull articles from my Major Spreadsheet and throw them in a new one. The second way I use Minor Spreadsheets is when I start a new paper. I add to these sheets on an ongoing basis to save me time later. I also have a sheet with cool studies that I want to come back to later (because who said reviewing literature can’t be fun?). For example, I have a sheet about international students, where I track all the literature concerning international students’ mental health. These are articles that could be related to other work I want to do. I use Minor Spreadsheets in two different ways.įirst, in the picture of my spreadsheets from above you’ll see at the bottom that I have different sheets within the same workbook. Minor Spreadsheets are much smaller than my Major Spreadsheet and have more specific details. Raul Pacheco-Vega writes about in his post called Synthesizing different bodies of work in your literature review: The conceptual synthesis Excel dump technique. In addition to my Major Spreadsheet, I also developed what I call Minor Spreadsheets, which are similar to what Dr. Then, when I’m writing about that topic, I sort the column so that I can easily pull all the articles that address that theme. When an article I’m adding addresses one of these in a research question or as a finding, I add a little x in the cell to show that. I, for example, have headings like: prevalence, stressors, depression, anxiety, suicide, accommodations, counseling, disclosure, faculty perceptions, and stigma.
You also want to think about the themes you might write about in your literature review. These headings can change, too. As you go along you can add or remove as you see fit.
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Some of these headings may not be of interest to you, but you are free to add any characteristic or metric you may want to use as a filter or sorting feature. Notes (where I put quotations I might want to use).Location (Canada, United States, United Kingdom, Other).The headings of your spreadsheet are where you can make this your own. The beautiful thing about workflow and organization is that there is no right way to do it you can customize anything. As Campbell points out in her post, this approach is great because it can help you see how far you’ve come and how much you’ve read. I started this in the first year of my program, so I have quite a few articles now. I add to my Major Spreadsheet whenever I come across an article pertinent to my research area (graduate students with mental health challenges and disabilities). Here are two pointers for your Major Spreadsheet:įirst, start early and add often. I therefore add anything related to my work: books, policies, blog posts. I initially was only adding journal articles, but realized this would work better if it truly housed all my resources. What you want to do is add a bunch of column headings for things you want to keep track of and then start adding resources to each row. I started a similar spreadsheet very early in my program. 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. In her post called “ How I Use Excel to Manage My Literature Review,” Elaine Campbell outlines her approach to using a spreadsheet to manage literature.
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The best part about my system: it doesn’t require buying any software and it doesn’t take hours to learn! Instead, I use a simple spreadsheet (Excel and/or Google Sheets) and a numbering format to keep track of all my resources. I’ve tried them all and none of have stuck. It’s not that there is anything wrong with them I know folks who swear by them. There are many different types of reference managers, including Refworks, Zotero, Endnote, and Mendeley. You can follow her on Twitter where she tweets about graduate education, mental health, and disability. candidate in Higher Education at the University of Toronto.
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