A Suggested Approach
Developing your literature review workflow is a creative process. How you approach organising references and writing is specific to your individual learning style and technology preferences.
This section will offer you a suggested workflow for your literature review, including the use of software to manage your references, annotate, explore, and cite them.
Overview Of Managing Your Workflow
Developing your literature review workflow is a creative process. How you approach organising references and writing is specific to your individual learning style and technology preferences.
There are a range of tools that you can use to assist you in making this process more efficient and resilient over time. You can perform most tasks related to the literature review workflow using one or all of the approaches we discuss, moving from note books to EndNote for reference management and NVivo for coding and advanced queries.
A suggested literature review workflow:
4.1 Manage Your References
As you accumulate literature by searching databases and the web, you will need to organise and store it for later review. For this purpose, Deakin provides you with the EndNote reference management software, which you can download free from the Deakin Software Library website.
Watch this short video to learn more about using EndNote on PC or Mac.
For detailed instructions and training documents, visit our comprehensive guide to Endnote.
For information about alternative tools, see our referencing software comparison table.
4.2 Annotate Your Literature
As you begin to read through the literature you have collected, you will be making notes, categorising articles with themes and key concepts, and collecting great quotations to support your review.
Using software throughout this process can assist you to make connections, synthesise what is and is not known, compare perspectives, identify gaps, and build a coherent evaluation.
Watch this video to learn about techniques for annotating your literature.
4.3 Develop Your Review
To develop your review you will need to analyse and synthesise your annotated content to:
- Identify relationships between ideas
- Identify similarities and differences in research findings
- Identify unanswered questions
- Document the development of ideas over time
- Identify directions for future research
4.4 Cite, Format, & Write
When you write up your literature review, reference management software will assist you to:
- Format your in-text citations
- Refer to page numbers
- Create the bibliography as you go.
Using reference management software allows you to easily update your bibliography and apply a style with one click.
Watch this video to learn more about citing while you write with EndNote and Microsoft Word. This video shows a slightly older version of Endnote, but it still works the same way, and is very similar on a Mac or PC.
For detailed instructions and training documents, visit our comprehensive guide to EndNote.