How to manage literature when writing a dissertation/paper [duplicate]

Question

How do you manage (workflow) writing the literature review for a paper or a dissertation?

Unfortunately my current method of going on binge reading stretches while scribbling notes on random bits of paper inevitably lead to a situation where I dread trying to write a coherent literature review because everything is disorganized.

The one time I did try to be more organized by using a template to capture and summarize info for each paper such as sampling, methodology, results, papers I want to read, etc., I ended up with so much information I became overwhelmed trying to synthesize it all.

I also developed this nasty habit of trawling through the citations of every paper I read and downloading like 80% of them. I then soon end up in a situation where I have hundreds upon hundreds of pdf's, most of which I literally don't have time to read. I'm basically a paper hoarder.

Any tips on how I can streamline my search, processing and writing up of literature?

Answer 1

Throughout working on the paper (including thinking before I start to write and then writing), whenever I find a paper that may be relevant, I save it. I make sure not to save anything that I see but only after checking the abstract and when I decide that there is a good chance that I will want to mention it in the literatere review part of the paper. I use Mendeley for this, but I can imagine google drive or even just a folder with PDFs would work.

I also do some searching on Google Scholar before I start working on the problem (to make sure that it is not already known) and then before I start writing (I have a better picture of the problem and my result by then; I also catch new papers this way). I also throw all the papers into Mendeley. Again, not anything that I find, only those I decide I will probably want to cite.

When the time comes, I go through all the papers, decide which ones to include, and write the "related work" part of the paper. Because I have filtered out the not so relevant papers before, I only usually have about 30 papers. Those I decide not to include, I usually move to some other folder to make the writing easier.

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The nice thing about Mendeley and similar software is that it allows you to save notes, this can be useful if you read through a paper, decide it is relevant but it is not obvious at first glance how. By making a note, you don't have to think about how it is related when you are writing the literature review.

Answer 2

Don't make notes; just start writing: Rather than scribbling notes on random bits of paper, open your favorite writing tool and start writing your literature review. They'll never come a time when you dread trying to write a coherent literature review because everything is disorganized, since you'll have been writing the review from the beginning, organizing as you go.