Preparing for a literature review can be a daunting task and requires a lot of discipline on the part of the researcher. Not only does s(he) need to apply a meaningful, rigorous, and systematic search regime but s(he) also needs to somehow test for relevance and identify trends, both mainstream and novel, in the often overwhelming population of compiled data.
In many cases researchers employ reference management software like Mendeley to assist in the research process, to store and organize relevant contents in order not to lose track and to help implement a meticulous and correct referencing practice. Exploring data, however, is above and beyond what most of these tools can help accomplish.
Enter NVivo, a software created to assist in making sense of un- or semi-structured qualitative data, broadly speaking. On top of being able to handle written or spoken words in large datasets, NVivo can also exploit demographic, or meta-, data, in a scholarly context e.g. publication year and journal, to create clusters and identify trends. Furthermore, NVivo offers a wide suit of paths to explore the data, from simple word frequency analyses through elaborate text searches to highly complex matrix queries.
And seeing that NVivo can be made to interact with most reference management software already populated by full-text and meta-data, it is a quite straightforward procedure to bring all of this information across to NVivo and thus make use of work already performed to collect the data. Once in NVivo you can cross-tabulate contents with metadata, for instance distribution across year or publisher, topics across geographies etc. and in this way get a head-start on your literature review project.
CBS Library runs NVivo seminars on a regular basis. Check out our event calendar for more details.
Contact: Joshua Kragh Bruhn or Liselotte Brandstrup