Organising the chaos… EndNote part 2

From April 2021:

It’s been a few months since my Endnote and Scrivener integration discoveries. Since then I’ve been drafting and redrafting my PhD research proposal in Scrivener along with my list of references, then copy/pasting it all into Microsoft Word for supervisor and peer review and feedback, WHAT? Didn’t I already crack referencing with EndNote in Scrivener and what about the compile feature in Scrivener? SERIOUSLY? Have I learned nothing?

Well, I haven’t been that bad. EndNote Desktop now has tons of PDFs attached to my references, smart groups are working nicely and I have just created a group that contains all the references cited in my research proposal. Admittedly, it took a few hours to locate and copy to the group but at least now I can easily tell that I cited 88 references in my proposal and exported to my preferred style, APA 6th for now. APA 7th? I haven’t decided for future work since I feel for the co-authors not listed in the first three of a collaborative paper, that could be me. The point though, is the ease of export for whichever style is chosen and this is particularly useful when submitting for publication where the style is predefined by the journal.

I was not so fortunate with references for an article I was co-authoring recently. The lead author was using Mendeley and set up a group where we could both store our references as we wrote our sections of the article. Somehow or other, this seemingly straightforward practice did not work as expected. As a backup I was also saving my references in EndNote just in case…. The style required by the journal did not have a name and I had not come across the need to abbreviate the journal title before. This was not going to be easy and it fell to the third co-author on the article to sort out the reference list and number each reference based on its location in the article. Fortunately, being project managers, we anticipated this would take a bit of work and factored in some time just ahead of submission date to address the needful.

Forward to March 2022 and I noticed this draft post sitting unpublished, unloved. It seems quite timely to continue this thread and publish it as I embark on my literature review in earnest. I have collected my data, drafted my findings and introduction chapters. Now I need to consider all the literature I have read to this point, the key question, where to start??? As always, I like to have some guidance to hand before embarking on important tasks and my first port of call is usually Pat Thomson’s blog. As expected, this post, “getting ready to write about the literature” is helpful since in it, Pat poses three questions:

What studies provide the warrant for your particular project? What studies will your research speak to? What studies provide the building blocks for your study?

The groups are empty of references right now but that will soon change since today is a PhD study day with my community of scholars at the Educational Research department at Lancaster University. Onwards…

Until next time, Sandra

Featured image courtesy of Bitmoji

References: https://patthomson.net/category/literature-review/page/2/