I'm looking for ideas on how to improve my workflow with systematic reviews.
I have a work flow that's working well for me with reviewing individual texts and notes organised by theme, which involves Bookends (storing and tagging), DevonThink (all literature notes and annotations) and Notebook (thematically organised notes) on mac, and GoodReader on iPad.
However, I'm not happy with my current way of handling systematic reviews, where a large body of literature has to be analysed more systematically across a set of characteristics. Here's what I'm doing at the moment.
I export all search results into a Bookends database (separate database for each systematic review). There, I assign search terms, search engines etc to the entries in the keywords section.
Then I export the metadata into excel. In excel, I code the entries, where the codes are in columns and each article has a separate row. The codes I'm working with for my current review are things like author, title, date, name of journal, research questions, key actors, institutional level, thematic focus, methodology, data, theoretical perspectives/key concepts, findings, implications, etc. Sometimes I work with this in Numbers, but because my current review is a collaboration with colleagues who work in a windows environment, I need the export option to excel.
What I like about working with the excel sheet is that it gives you one, large visualisation of the data set, where it's easy to compare, side by side, the research questions or the thematic focus of the findings of each entry. By using the sort function, you can easily group the entries based on different characteristics, such as whether the articles are quantitative or qualitative, empirical or theoretical, and so on. The problem, though is that excel (or Numbers) isn't really designed to handle that much text. It's a bit fiddly at time to enter text, and I've also experienced that the file gets really slow and difficult to work with, especially if I've cut and pasted lots of text from various pdf files.
Several years ago I experienced a bit with OmniOutliner for the same purpose, but from what I can remember I stuck with excel because the sorting options were better.
So, in short: I'd like to retain the visualisation and the sorting options, and preferably, the ability to import meta data from Bookends, but in an app that's designed to work with text rather than numbers. Any suggestions? Alternatively, does anyone have other workflows that are working well and which achieves similar purposes?
I have a work flow that's working well for me with reviewing individual texts and notes organised by theme, which involves Bookends (storing and tagging), DevonThink (all literature notes and annotations) and Notebook (thematically organised notes) on mac, and GoodReader on iPad.
However, I'm not happy with my current way of handling systematic reviews, where a large body of literature has to be analysed more systematically across a set of characteristics. Here's what I'm doing at the moment.
I export all search results into a Bookends database (separate database for each systematic review). There, I assign search terms, search engines etc to the entries in the keywords section.
Then I export the metadata into excel. In excel, I code the entries, where the codes are in columns and each article has a separate row. The codes I'm working with for my current review are things like author, title, date, name of journal, research questions, key actors, institutional level, thematic focus, methodology, data, theoretical perspectives/key concepts, findings, implications, etc. Sometimes I work with this in Numbers, but because my current review is a collaboration with colleagues who work in a windows environment, I need the export option to excel.
What I like about working with the excel sheet is that it gives you one, large visualisation of the data set, where it's easy to compare, side by side, the research questions or the thematic focus of the findings of each entry. By using the sort function, you can easily group the entries based on different characteristics, such as whether the articles are quantitative or qualitative, empirical or theoretical, and so on. The problem, though is that excel (or Numbers) isn't really designed to handle that much text. It's a bit fiddly at time to enter text, and I've also experienced that the file gets really slow and difficult to work with, especially if I've cut and pasted lots of text from various pdf files.
Several years ago I experienced a bit with OmniOutliner for the same purpose, but from what I can remember I stuck with excel because the sorting options were better.
So, in short: I'd like to retain the visualisation and the sorting options, and preferably, the ability to import meta data from Bookends, but in an app that's designed to work with text rather than numbers. Any suggestions? Alternatively, does anyone have other workflows that are working well and which achieves similar purposes?