![]() I use the fantastic Ulysses for Mac for nearly all of my writing. Writing #Īgain, I won’t go into this too much, as most people have their own tools and preferred way of working. HTML output from TAMS Analyzer: you can reformat so it’s easier to print (and read) 4. Instead of thirty print outs, you have one – admittedly quite big – file with several thematic groupings, each with a mixture of authors and sources. The great benefit of this extra step is a single file that can easily contain insight and analysis from twenty or thirty articles (or more). The source name – drawn from the plain text export of your initial highlights – is appended (usually Author-Year). Finally, with a couple of clicks, TAMS Analyzer can generate a table with headings at the top, and all of the highlights below – one box per highlight. Usually this will be within 4-5 headings that will naturally emerge from the initial reading: for a recent review of universities and cities, for example, I had the headings ‘leadership’, ‘international’, ‘regional’, ‘urban’ and ‘conclusions’. I then work through my imported highlights, and tag them. Effective use of TAMS Analyzer is a post in itself, but the documentation is fairly solid. In this case, I export each reading as an individual file and import these into TAMS Analyzer, an excellent open-source Mac application for qualitative text analysis. However, in more advanced literature reviews, an extra step is helpful. The beauty of highlighting in an application like Skim or Papers is the automatic inclusion of page numbers and other bibliographic information in the exported file.ĭepending on the complexity of the project, I may just export all the notes as one giant text file, print this, and start writing. Exporting and tagging notes #Īll highlights are now exported as plain text files – one per article or report, or a single file with all highlights across all readings. Want a speedier version of this workflow? □ Check out how to do quick and dirty literature surveys 3. Papers has this function built in applications like Skim (open source for Mac) and Highlights (a commercial alternative for Mac and iOS) can also do this, and both play nicely with Zotfile (a Zotero PDF management plugin – great if you’re a fan of keeping everything open source). Whilst reading I highlight relevant paragraphs or sentences – as less is better try to avoid highlighting entire pages – and I add comments with any thoughts or ideas. This means later articles can be skim read (when concentration levels are lower) to pick up additional insight or nuance. I now read through everything in rough order of how important I think the article will be. Google Scholar is invaluable for sourcing articles (Papers allows you to search Google Scholar and import articles from within the application Zotero has browser integrations to allow one-click importing).Įxample screenshot of Papers for Mac: note the highlighted PDF 2. I group everything by project into smart folders using tags. In the past I used version 3 of Papers for Mac, but I have recently switched to Zotero, a powerful open source, cross-platform alternative. For me, this is PDFs of articles, reports, and book chapters. I won’t go into great detail here, but I collect all my research materials together first. It won’t work for everyone, although there is plenty of scope for customisation. Here’s my academic writing workflow: it allows me to quickly pull together information from dozens of articles into a structured format that allows new ideas and connections to form. Did you just land on this site for the first time? □ After this you might like to read the other posts in this series on processes and workflows.
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