Hacking the Literature Review: Opportunities and Innovations to Improve the Research Process

Abstract

Research outputs across the academic disciplines are almost exclusively published electronically. Organizing and managing these digital resources for purposes of review, and with the technical savvy to do so, are now essential skills for graduate study and life in academia. Paradoxically, digital and web-based technologies provide greater ease and efficiency with which to gather mass amounts of information, while at the same time presenting new challenges for reading, analyzing, organizing, and storing resources. Students, scholars, and the librarians who support them must adopt and refine practices to convert from paper-full to paperless literature review. This article proposes a methodical, reproducible, three-stage process that harnesses the power digital tools bring to the research cycle, regardless of the user’s preferred platform or operating system. Focusing just on the literature review phase, we develop a conceptual framework, illustrated with concrete tips and advice for storing and organizing, reading and annotating, and analyzing and writing. We demonstrate how a researcher’s self-selected suite of tools may be used to complement and even overcome the limitations of comprehensive academic literature and composition platforms such as Docear and F1000Workspace, especially regarding qualitative data analysis software for analyzing and coding research literature. Using these techniques, librarians can become teachers and research partners supporting the skill development of faculty and students.

Greta Thunberg and the Generation of Moral Authority: A Systematic Literature Review on the Characteristics of Thunberg’s Leadership

“…The data gathered from online electronic sources were analyzed within the framework of deductive content analysis, a facility available in the ATLAS-ti.9, Scientific Software Development GmbH, Berlin, Germany, qualitative analysis software [39]. In this deductive approach, the data were assigned to ATLAS-ti.9, Scientific Software Development GmbH, Berlin, Germany, for qualitative content analysis, a method often used to systematically analyze written material [42]. The coding frame was based on During the data analysis, the researchers began with a manifest deductive qualitative content analysis to discuss the different qualities of leadership that Thunberg possesses and her impact on people.…”

“…According to Covey [31], a moral authority needs to be trustworthy. Trust is defined by Blackford [42] (p. 72) as a "stable belief in the consistency, truth, or ability of someone". Adams [68] states that trust in a leader emerges when the leader's actions are consistent with their pre-existing behaviors and experiences.…”

“…Sacrifices benefits and needs, evoking social comparison among people [3,18,21,26,28,34,47,[52][53][54] Engages with her followers and sacrifices her own needs to commit to the shared goal [4,9,13,16,17,27,42,49,55] Provides a collective identity via the "Greta Thunberg Effect" [7,8,10,16,20,41,54] Encourages non-traditional thinking and challenges existing truths [3,11,23,24,36,51] Offers solution to climate change [3,5,7,11,23,24,27,31,48,51,52] "Leads by example" by sacrificing benefits and comforts [3,11,24,28,30,…”

Developing a Quality Assurance Approach for an Online Professional Military Education Institution

“…The large number of examples from other institutions can be overwhelming. As when conducting literature reviews, we recommend that institutions apply selection criteria to instruments they are reviewing (Lubke et al, 2017). For example, when screening prebuilt examples for this project, we adopted criteria from Baldwin, Ching, & Hsu (2018) to narrow down our final selection.…”

Leave the browser behind: Placing discovery within the user's workflow

“…Less common are articles looking at the software functionality itself, and opportunities for embedding library services, including discovery options. Lubke, Paulus, Britt, and Atkins (2017) look at options for unifying the workflow steps connected with the literature review process, but do not address discovery, instead beginning the workflow with the act of PDF storage and annotation.…”