How to Organise References and Research Paper Notes | Thesis Writing (Episode #6)
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- Опубликовано: 15 июл 2024
- My guide to organising research paper references and their notes in a simple spreadsheet - ideal for literature reviews, dissertations or essays!
I am now 10,000 words into my PhD Thesis literature review and in an attempt to organise all my references, I came up with an excel template so all my citations and notes are in the same place, and organised into the different sections of my writing. One regret I have about this system is I WISH I WOULD HAVE STARTED IT EARLIER! So whatever point you are at in your PhD, undergraduate degree, college or school, start collecting your citations and notes in this way and you will find writing your future projects SO much easier!
Give this a go if you are also on a quest to get your notes more in order and smash out the words for your assignment!
#LiteratureReview #ReferenceOrganisation #PhDThesisWriting
For more on my thesis writing antics, follow my social media:
Instagram: / julia.ravey.science
TikTok: / juliaraveyscience
Website: www.juliaraveyscience.com/ 
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Oh my God! This was perhaps THE MOST HELPFUL video I've seen so far!! Thank you for the tips!!! Agree with one of the comments in regards to sharing the visuals.
Ahh thank you so much! I am so glad you enjoyed! And thats for the tip about visuals - I am doing this more in my more recent videos :)
You are a God sent!! I am in the first week of my PhD. I just came across your video, and I could just kiss you!! Lol. God is GOOD! Thank you for taking that leap and making this video. I will def check out more of your videos. Stay blessed! Mr. Pennella
This is excellent. I am doing MA and this had really helped. Well done
Thank you for these useful advices! I was completely lost and I used this technique which helped me a lot to write my literature review, so thank you very much!!
I am so glad it helped!
Thank you Thank you Thank you for another great video!!!!! I will start this process TODAY. I have ZERO organization methods so this has definitely inspired me!!!!!
Not a problem at all! It is a really simple task to start with and will make writing much easier. Let me know how it goes!
Thank you for posting this video. I'm at the beginning phase of my thesis prep and this is excellent!
Glad it was helpful! Good luck!
Started my PhD on Monday and I'm spending the first few months doing the literature review because of COVID PhD students aren't able to go into the lab on campus. This is going to be a massive help on how to organise papers because I will be the first to admit that it is a little daunting starting into the literature review after only doing one literature review before at undergrad level. Thank you so much for these tips
You have got this! Thank you for your kind words and good luck with the review!
I CAN NOT WAIT for your next video - currently (as in, last four months) in a ball of procrastination.
Thank you Emma! It has been such a tough time for concentration - I have been working at half speed for sure... Hope the tips in the next video help you as much as they helped me!
Thank you, thank you sooo much!! I am the youngest person at my university doing a PhD (20 years old). And at times I feel so overwhelmed and at times find it so hard to ask about these things because I just assume everyone else just knows how to do everything except me. I really wanted to use a Spreadsheet but didn't know how I would organize it so thank you!
Ahh that is an incredible achievement - well done! I hope this method helps you!
I am 40 doing an MA and I have found that as I am not shy about asking for help, and admitting I don't know how to organise my research perfectly or at all formally. When I ask, it seems to liberate everyone else to admit they don't know how to do this stuff either. I have also found out that most of society is like this. Whole lot of people working very very hard to look like they know what they are doing, rather than just working hard at doing them well. ;)
Doing a phd a 20 is so totally amazing. GO you! Remember to have fun :D
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oh my gosh - i just paused and wandered over to your channel - IT is so amazing - Thank you !
Thank you so much! So kind!
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so much positive energy, marvelous presentation, thanx
This was exactly what I was looking for!! Thank you! Sharing this with my PHD group!
Thank you! I hope they enjoyed 😊
Simple yet genious tips! 👌
Wow, really wondering why I didn’t do this before. I’m going to start reorganizing my references this week!!
Yay! So glad you found it useful!
So helpful! I am looking for how I could organize my researches for my master dissertation.
This is very useful for me, I am having a hard time organizing all my papers and you just made it easier for me! :) Thanks!
Thank you so much!
Thank you ! That was very helpful. I have tweaked it a bit to use for taking notes on papers for my MSc👍🏾
So glad it was helpful! thank you!
Hey Julia, thanks so much for your tips, it helped a lot! :D
Thank you so much, I needed this!! :D
Great video, but could've done with visual cues for all us visual learners! I find it hard just to follow with dialogue alone
Noted! I will definitely by getting more visuals in to my more recent videos to help make things uber clear :)
@@juliaraveyscience Hello Julia! I really appreciated your videos. I came across your channel few days ago in my endeavor to make (you can either say "to start" :P ) my undergraduate thesis. So Big Thanks to You! I am starting to realize how to do it. Something I would like to see from you is the exact mind process while you actually read a paper. That would help me understand what may be crucial for me and what not and would give me a deeper understanding on how and what to write in notes. Julia you're awesome :D
I am a visual learner as well. I turned on the closed caption and took some screenshots when images where displayed. This helped me a lot and I hope this will help you as well:)
I loved this series! Thank you! Could you share with us your model for this spreadsheet?
I would love to see a video about the whole discussion point - did you already upload such, did I miss it, aaaaaah? :D Thanks for sharing your knowledge, I love your videos - greetz from a PhD newbie
Thank you! this was very helpful. I am currently starting my research for my MA-Thesis in political science. So...you have a new follower :)))
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Thank you so much, that was so helpful! I'm gonna make a spread sheet like that now
So glad it was helpful!
Thank you, appreciate it!!
I was looking for the template to download and I couldn't find. I managed to make my own with some modification taking help from another youtuber. Thank you. Bless you.
Thank you so much !! This is going to help so much 💪🏼💪🏼🔥
You are welcome! Glad to help :)
Starting my MSc dissertation neeed this
Very helpful. And well explained.
Thank you so much for this video which is realllly very helpfull for us phd students !
Not a problem! So glad you found it useful!
Thank you Julia...It is very helpful.
You're so welcome! Glad it was useful
I'm starting to write in Dec and I'll definitely be trying this technique!!
Ahhh good luck Laurel! You will be great :)
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Vary useful tips, THANK YOU! ♥
Thank you! :)
SUBSCRIBED. Thank you, I'm going to try your method!
Thank you! I hope it works well for you
I have just started writing my masters thesis and already finding it hard to keep track of all the sources I've been finding. Going to give the spreadsheet a go I think, I had an idea about numbering all my citations/sections I want reference back to for each paper/book etc.. is this a good or bad strategy you think (as someone who has more experience than me! My bachelors thesis organisation was a mess and I am trying to avoid that this time! Thank you for making this video it was super helpful :)
I LOVE YOU THANK YOU
Thank you!!
I really like your accent, thx for the guide!
Ahh thank you very much!
You are most definitely my new favourite person #Phdchat #Phdchildrensrights
Thanks for sharing. I've tried to make a spreadsheet like this before, however I always end up not updating it and giving up. As a result I'm now left with hundreds of unorganised papers in Zotero. Maybe I'll have another crack at it before I hit my third year (or now) to save me some pain! :D
Thank you! Ahhh I know what you mean, I am definitely the type of person who starts out with good intentions of keeping up a system and when I get busy, I stop. Yes I would definitely try now before you reach your write up - just add them in as you go and assign them to a broad section. Even without notes initially, it is good to have a bank of everything you need to read :)
I accidentally clicked on this video and lowkey this is exactly what I needed 😅
I’m in my final year of the PhD and never had a proper organization system
Thanks for the video, very helpful. In a reply to another comment you mentioned you would upload your template to the website but I can't find it. It would be super helpful if you could share it please?
Thanks for the video, though we would have appreciated a copy of the excel format.
This is very useful! Thank you!!!
Thank you so much! I am glad it was helpful!
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Thank you so much!
You are welcome! Hope it helped :)
@@juliaraveyscience yes it helped a lot :)
Beautiful clip ! ❤ Very nice Vlog, Can You make clip.. Organisation, cleaning office desk - Paper Organization Declutter - sorting ripping..normal speed?
Thank you, such a great idea! Do you type your notes directly in Excel? (since it can be a bit annoying to type in)
Not a problem at all! I do type directly in - I make the boxes big (row height ~100) and use the option/alt key to move to new lines within that box. But you could also use a note taking app (like Evernote) and then copy the notes into the excel for permanent storage!
Thank you, is there a template for referances, please
OMG I have been through exactly the same thing. And I haven’t taken notes either😂
So painful! I wish I had done it sooner haha
I can help you
@@johnmwaura688 Pleaaaaaaase!!!!!!!
Hello I have to say thank you for the lifesaving tip. I just subscribed. However, I do wish you showed an example of how you place all those notes into Excel. I'm saying this because I never use Excel lol. Thanks though !
Thank you very much!! And ahhh I am sorry! There are some awesome excel tutorials on RUclips which should help :)
Hello! Super helpful advice !
One question, what do you do if a paper covers two different subsections ??
Thank you 💕
Thank you! I think you could maybe write it as both - there is a way on excel to organise columns by the words they have in them I think, but I am not the best! You could make a second column called 'additional topic' and write it in there! I used to classify by the major one but write the others in the same box so if I ctrl+f I would make sure I had everything.
If a paper contains points in several section, how do you organise it?
May I ask you did you have template?
Hy, how many papers do you used to read per day. It is really challenging to read many papers and retrive relevant information. Can you provide your suggestions?
Thank you for your video. Super helpful tips! A few questions, do you possibly have a sample page of your Excel sheet to see in detail what your sections and subsections might look like? Not sure I quite follow - don't worry, I'm an MA in Education candidate. Also, do I understand correctly: you upload papers into Mendeley, and then are able to insert those citations into a Word doc when you write? Can you do that in Excel, too? Again, grateful for this video.
There is a little overlap between the Reference Management Software (Mendley, Endnote, Zotero) and the Excel spread sheet. Your second question - once the references are in your software (which is linked to WORD or similar) you are able to insert citations while you are writing - and later with the click of a few keys, your Reference section is generated from your in-text citations. (BTW, in-text citations don't show up on a word count. ) . That's the key purpose of RMS.
Your first question is the topic of this video, which is to use a spreadsheet to catalog or organise as described - the spread sheet can be sorted, edited, etc. and referenced to you RMS citations. You can almost do this with RMS alone, but there's a little more power to do them independently. In you RMS there is a section for "notes" or "Extra" where you can summarise a source and maybe list why it's relevant for your paper. There are two ways of getting this back:
The first way is to reproduce it on the Excel sheet for sorting, but you can export everything in, say, Zotero to Excel - don't do it manually! Too much work. Where the summary is in Zotero, it will show up in Excel - but you can still add it to Excel later. To save work I intend to do most of my reviews/summaries on Zotero, then export to Excel.
The second way is to write your notes in "extra" on Zotero (similar to the others) ,then create an annotated bibliography, which will have the reference followed by notes. This gets put onto WORD or similar, so you still have to scroll to find it (or search/find) So it's personal choice whether the Excel or Word approach works for you. So read the document, make a summary, state why you want it for your paper, and also list whether it's a) the problem b) the solution or c) evidence to support your case. After that you have to track it in one of the three methods described.
After writing and thinking about this, I see where the Excel sheet approach has an advantage over the annotated Bibliography placed on WORD. In Excel you can list and sort to mutliple categories/themes so you are searching for the category/theme without regard to the author just yet In WORD, the annotated Bibliography lists alphabetically according to author, not the content themes of the resource. You could do a word search in your descriptions of the annotated bibliography, but it is less effective than the Excel approach, and you can already do this directly to Zotero - do a word or author search. I guess in tandem it all works but an earlier step is the Excel.
Hi Julia! Thanks for this tip, I'll give it a go. I'm in my 1st year of grad school and am struggling to find a good way to make notes for each paper. I'm currently using Endnote, which has the 'cite as I write' feature too. I think this accompanying master excel sheet will be of great help!
What if you have a paper that you'd like to use in multiple sections of your literature review? Has that happen before, and how do you organise that without duplicate entries in the excel sheet?
Hi Chalystha! Thank you so much for your comment - I hope the spreadsheet helps to organise your thoughts and notes!
I write all the sections the paper applies to in the 'Section' box. Then when I start a new section, I will ctrl-f the title to check if any other papers in the spreadsheet correspond to that section. If I find one, I move the section title I am currently working on to the top of the section box and then reorder the spreadsheet so it groups with the other papers I need to read!
You could also colour code the spreadsheet so if a paper relates to 2 sections, it could be blue, 3 sections = green, etc so you know which papers will need to be used multiple times :)
@@juliaraveyscience Got it! Cool! Thanks!!
Get in touch with me in case you need help with any research papers or any assignments.
Great method, have been using it too. But sometimes I get lost in many papers, especially when i get from one paper to another in that referenced and so on ...when I dont want to miss any important information. How do you deal with that ?
I do this too! I will read the abstract of the papers I click through to and if I think it will be something I will need later, I will copy the reference into the spreadsheet and come back to it. I feel like getting into a habit of finishing the paper you set out to read is a good one! Then come back to others later :) Thanks!
Great video. I will like to see background slide show to make your suggestions can be better demonstrated. Visual impression has much more impact than speech presentation as a dominant component. Where did you go to school, and what is your PhD thesis that your wrote with desirable efficiency and high grading of you choice?
Avi Deshmukh, MD, FACS, MBA, MHA, MHSM
Thank you!
I go to UCL and my PhD thesis research is in Alzheimer's disease!
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Can you share a template of your spreadsheets?
So.. why use mandalay when you have excel?
Doesnt Mendeley allow you to do all of this without having to create a separate spreadsheet? On Mendeley you can save readings with their title add them to folders created for each topic or section and write notes on each one.
That’s what I’m thinking. It’s a useful exercise but I think all the tools exists in Mendeley to achieve the same objective?
Wondering the same. Commenting to stay updated on new replies related to this :)
Me too but about Endnote :)
I've been using Mendeley to keep notes for a while, but after watching this I think a spreadsheet would be easier if I need to compare several articles... simply because they are on the same page
@@qingye730 I've been using Mendeley to the "notes", but I really feel the need to have it all in the same "page", as you said. I'm gonna try to compile these notes in the spreadsheet. Maybe Julia could share her spreadsheet template? I didn't get if there will be quotes in there. So I thought of a separate tab only for quotes+keywords, using the same texts as references.
So I get that before you go and write a specific section you'll go back through your papers and make those key points and main message notes, but before that are you just reading papers and downloading them to Mendeley and labeling them with which section you think you'll use it for? Or are you just reading random papers and making these notes as you go?
I read papers as I went and then made the notes when I put the spreadsheet together, but I wish I had had this spreadsheet on the go from the start of my PhD. Then I would've made notes as I read the papers initially rather than having to go back through them all again!
@@juliaraveyscience okay thank you!
@@juliaraveyscience I have one more qquestionWhy is using excel better than Mendeley for annotations/ notetaking?
Very useful... can you share sample spreadsheet
Yes I will upload soon!
@@juliaraveyscience Subscribed and checked out your website - nice! Is there a sample (or even text list) of header topics? Great ideas - starting my PhD next week and glad for a method to organise papers
EndNote! :D
Yes! I use Mendeley to store all my references!
@@juliaraveyscience Yes, came across that one too in 'top reference manager lists'... but luckily my Uni provides EndNote, so that's the easiest option ;)
great video. welldone. Could you please direct me to the video on discussions.
Thank you! That video has not been made - I am still finishing my writing. I will let you know if I do make it
@@juliaraveyscience Thank you for your response. Fingers crossed
How long did you take in total for your Lit Review ?
About 2 months! Working Mon-Fri for about 5-6 hours max per day
Mam now I am doing bsc in neuro electro physiology I want to do PhD in it is it possible for me
Definitely! If you love the work you do, go for it!
Girl, where were you when I enrolled in my PhD :D.
Hahaha I only came up with this technique in my final year - so frustrating! Wish I'd been doing it from day 1
It may be easy for you, but for me, it is as hard as going up one hill.
Mam plz help me out
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