How to Organise References and Research Paper Notes | Thesis Writing (Episode #6)

it's made my writing so so much quicker hi everyone I hope you're all doing alright thank you so much for coming back for some more he says adventures with me I'm now at the point where I am about two-thirds of the way through my literature review and something that I've been asked by so many people it's how do you organize and read research papers so I thought that would be what I would talk about today because I have a system of course and it is really really easy to do and it saves so much time okay so much time the one regret I have about this system is I wish I'd started it during my first year of PhD so if you are early on in your PhD or pre write off or even pre PhD like if you are an undergrad student this type of spreadsheet will save you a lot of time and it just makes things just makes life easier easier so drawing my PhD I have read hundreds and hundreds of papers and the way I save them during my PhD was in folders on my computer so I had folders for each subject area and then if I found a paper that was related to that subject area I'm simply download it into its matching folder so I have a folder called papers then within that folder there are folders for different topics and the raw papers are saved into these different folders so that's in the system that I've worked with throughout my whole PhD I also use Mendeley add my reference manager tool I haven't tried any of you this so I don't know if it's fair well worse but I find Mendel a really really good because it allows you to have an insert in Microsoft Word where you can really really easily put your references into your writing so Mandalay has been the tool that I've always used and I would recommend so if you're looking for a ref manager mandoline so what I would do is take my papers from these folders and then simply download them into Mendeley and then what that does ah I'm so sorry I'm in the lock and there's like birds running across the roof birds so I would take the papers that I've downloaded and open them up in Mendeley and then what Mendeley does is if formats these papers into a reference for you so it's really nice really straightforward and something that you can easily do as you go along with your project so I came to my lit review and I was like okay I've got hundreds of papers here that I've read and I now need to summarize these in context of my work and you know you're a bit like oh this there's so much oh so I was like right how can we make this a little bit easier for myself so I went to my old favorite Microsoft Excel and I made this spreadsheet so the spreadsheet has a few different headings in it the first heading is your reference and this is where you will copy in your citation for an individual paper the next heading along is the section of your lit review where this paper will go so what I've done here is use my thesis plant from the last video for all of those lovely subsections that we came up with and I've designated papers to certain sections what this means is you can sort your excel by this column and it will group all the papers together that are in the same section of your review the next section along is the key point from that paper and a key summary of why it's important to your work and this is a last thing I write when I'm reading a paper just a single sentence of someone why it's important for me and my project the next column we have key points from the paper this is where I will write their notes which I'll go over in a second when I am reading and the last column is critiques so if you're reading the paper I pick anything off which you think you could be a bit critical of or you could use in your discussion I'll do a whole other video on description don't worry then you can make a note of it in here so you have this nice set up and the first thing I would do is go through the papers you already have and copy their citations into the spreadsheet so this is why I'm saying I would have loved to have done this from my first year of PhD because then I would have had this master spreadsheet that I had all of my references in with all my notes where to me I don't really make notes on papers as I go which is something I really do regret I repaid and then sort of taking the information I'm like oh yeah I remember like the key message of that paper it's when I see the paper come off I'm like oh yeah I know where that's gonna get but I don't have any notes of like the really specific details of that where I have to go back to the paper and like reread the methods again or go over the results again it just takes so much time so that's why you should start this spreadsheet as soon as possible so yeah I start with putting in all your citations from the papers you've already saved throughout your PhD or already back throughout your PhD then adding all your other references you might find from reviews other research articles and the great thing about this spreadsheet is is that whenever you find a new reference and you think that could be important for my PhD you can just copy the citation and add it into your list and you've definitely don't got the citation saved and it's not going to like just drift off into nowhere and you're like what is that paper you can save it really really quickly and then come back and read it later so once you've got your citations and they've all been assigned to different sections of your lit review what I then do is I work through my review a section at a time this is the way that I like to work I find I'm much more focused now I'm just like zoned in on a single aspect of my research because otherwise so I will then organize my spreadsheet by that second column so everything is grouped into the different subsections that I need and then I start the writing process of working through a section at a time I will pull up my spreadsheet on half of the window and then in the other half I will use this to look at the citations for that section so if I already have them saved I'll pull up the PDF if I don't I'll go to Google Scholar and download the PDF and then what I do is I make notes on these papers in that fourth column the column where it says key points about the paper and read through the paper and for some of these I've already read them before so I sort of know what's coming up and read them quite quickly I make shorthand notes of key things that I know that are going to be important for my lit review and using this method I find that I am really selective with what putting into this keypoint box I'm not writing every single thing in there I am just selecting the bits are gonna be important for me it takes me probably about 25 minutes to half an hour to go through a paper if I've already read it if I haven't read it sometimes it takes a little bit longer but it's just a case of going through and making those notes if you come across any criticisms in that time as well this is where you can add it to that final column of all they use this mouse model which we know isn't very good or something like that you can then just add that as a quick note but really focusing on the one paper at a time just makes things so much easier once you've read the paper got your key points I then fill in that middle column to say what the key message is of that paper so just write a sentence and then I move on to the next paper in that section so per section you may have five papers you may have six seven eight nine ten lots of papers I'm not sure it depends on how big the section is that you're writing I tried to break things out into a smaller subsection as possible and I read all of the citations that I have for the section because we've already scoured the internet for all relevant up-to-date citations here and once I've read all of the citations for one section made these brief notes got that key summary sentence I will then start to write and I will write that section out using the references that I have already read I think this way it makes it so much easier to write because you really really focus on that section all of the papers you've read and are really fresh in your mind and you've extracted all of the key points that you need to potentially mention in your work as well so this is the way that I've been doing it and I found it really really useful so what you should have ended up with here from this video it's a spreadsheet of all of your citations that have been organized into the different subsections of your lit review as you go through this lit review you can read them take out those key points write any criticisms you may have and then sum up each paper in its single sentence give it a go because it's me my writing so so much quicker so much quicker and now with hindsight if I've actually just been doing this since my first year I would have filled in the majority of these citations already so definitely start as soon as possible getting that spreadsheet on the go for your research papers and it is just a really great way to keep on top of them and get that key information all organized under one roof so now I am over ten thousand words into my lit review I think I probably have about four or five thousand words to go I will keep you posted on how that is going my next video is gonna actually be on how to be productive when writing over the past couple of weeks I have written so much more than I have done previously and that's because I changed a few things about my routine and it just made me like so much more productive so come back next week for a video on a few things that you could change in your daily routine to get them words done thank you for watching and I shall see you for more thesis tips thesis writing due near being like what am I doing with myself type of thing you know if you have any questions as they're always you can comment on this video or you can catch me on any of my social media channels you can just direct message me and I will hopefully be able to help you with any queries you may have but again thank you for watching and also thank you so much for all your support with these videos it's really hard writing a thesis you are quite alone and quite isolated so it's really great to have this like virtual community who are all like cheer me on so I really appreciate that you are all amazing and I will catch you next time Oh

Channel: Julia Ravey Science

Views: 24,252

Rating: 4.9444447 out of 5

Keywords: PhD Thesis, References, Bibliography, Research Paper, Organisation, Organization

Id: vKXNbVx8dKw

Length: 10min 25sec (625 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 07 2020