Learning Skills and Guidance

Literature researching

Note taking, annotating and summarizing

The key challenge for you when undertaking your reading and review of the literature is to be both effective and efficient. Capturing the essence of published materials is important for your understanding, and is vital for the rigor of any assignment or class papers you produce. Since the review will be conducted over a lengthy period and revisited numerous times it is again important from the outset to adopt a clear process for note taking. This section examines a number of techniques commonly used to help the note taking process.

The temptation to highlight, underline or annotate large tracts of an article is one that should be avoided simply because it may well distract away from important concepts or findings when you return to the piece later.  You are reading academic literature with a specific purpose in mind and this should be the rationale for making and recording notes. For example, reviewing a piece in order to identify what underpinning theories it uses is quite different from comparing its findings to other published research. Keeping notes separate from the source material is thus one of the primary mechanisms used to enable you to collate and synthesize all of the notes, summaries and commentaries you will produced during your course

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A number of commonly used methods for recording analysis of an item are outlined below:

Using ‘post it/sticky notes’

One of the great advantages of using ‘post it’ or ‘sticky notes’ is that they are easy to manipulate and can be stuck on the source material without causing damage. Particularly when reviewing a library book, it is not desirable to make notes onto the page, so compilation of notes during reading then retaining them once you return the book is extremely useful and achieved by writing short notes and extracts onto ‘post-it or sticky’ notes.  These can be affixed to the relevant page of the text or article during review, different colored notes can be used for different purposes (such as yellow for key empirical findings, green for methodology and red for citations) and subsequently transferred onto larger sheets of paper or card for collating and organizing into topic and themed groups. Each note should have a reference to the exact source (i.e. record number and page), allowing both cross referencing and ease of return to source. It also allows the reading and note taking activity to be decoupled from the literature analysis. 
Once the notes have been made and a synthesis of the literature needed, organizing each note and compiling a detailed summary review involves sorting and organizing all of the post it notes according to predetermined or emergent themes – it may be useful to spend sometime just reviewing all of the notes in order to gain a good overview of these themes.
Whilst this is a very portable and ‘low-tech’ method, it still allows for a high degree of flexibility and manipulation of notes throughout the research process.

Using record sheets and worksheets

Employing a common form or table for mapping the literature helps to build the review using common fields and themes. The use of tables also allows comparison across various fields – for example by author, theme, theory or citation. Furthermore, the content of such tables can readily be transferred into a spreadsheet such as Excel to allow greater manipulation and control over the content of the review.
Below are examples record sheets and worksheets that are typically used to summarize the review at various stages of progression.

 

Record Sheet (Hart 1998: 146)

	Author/date	Author/date	Author/date
Topic/Theme/Concept
Description
Antecedents
Evidence/Data
Consequences (therefore)
Part of (major category

Worksheet (Hart 1998:150)

Using these tables will enables identification of the salient points from each work reviewed, allows cross reference and comparison of different works and provides a robust insight to the nature of a topic, particularly how it has been researched and how knowledge has developed.

As the literature review develops it helps to highlight the relevant and important keywords and phrases that can be used to classify the body of literature. It will then be relatively easy to cut and paste the main elements of the review into a bibliographic database which increases the flexibility and quality of the literature records. Furthermore, the ability to be able to collate and organize the literature using keywords, phrases and themes will be a vital step in the construction of a map of the literature

 

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