A major goal that I have set for myself this week is organization. Spurred on by the readings in Chapter 4 and 5 in the text book I have begun to appreciate that the more organized you are from the beginning the better off you will be over the long haul. I plan to use the suggestions offered in Chapter 5 to begin organizing some of the hard copies of articles that I already have at home. Currently they are sitting in a nondescript pile in a file cabinet in my basement. Not exactly what the authors would call organization. I also plan on exploring the method that I will use to organize my searches online. In Chapter 5, Endnote was described extensively but perhaps using Microsoft office would work as well. I would like to know someones opinion on this topic. Currently articles that I have downloaded and saved to my computer are saved in folders related to the course that I used them in. I realize that this is not an effective method of organization for writing a literature review.
In Chapter 4 the authors detailed ways to keep effective notes on articles and also discussed reading strategies. I found this to be very helpful and will definitely make a plan for note taking and organizing these notes. While I have never been a fan of notecards, I can see the benefits of keeping these in a certain order based on topics and then rearranging the order of them in preparation for assembling parts of the literature review.
I also benefitted from Dr. Songs suggestion to review the abstracts of all of the articles obtained from a search. This will definitely help narrow down articles that are most appropriate for the topic that I am considering. I will proceed as the book suggested and keep track of all of the searches that I do in some organized fashion from this point forward.
I am still fearful of this entire process but I feel that getting organized will definitely help dispel some of the intimidation that I am feeling right now. I cannot write until I read. I cannot read until I determine what to read and this will require getting organized from the start.
tuliyan said,
March 4, 2010 at 4:24 pm
Many people feel the same way: “cannot write until I read.” Maybe starting writing with every article you have read. Don’t worry about the format or logical flow of your overall writing, but just starting journaling what you have learned from each article about your topic and what you have been inspired to learn and/or learn more about. I would always keep the original journal (don’t delete anything I have written), but rather save it as a different copy when re-organizing and polishing it to be a formal report.