3. Writing a Literature Review from NVivo

One of the biggest steps in NVivo is moving from working in its environment to writing up your research in a word processing tool like Microsoft word (or if you're working with formulas and a lot of text - Latex). NVivo is designed to help you to begin writing, but it can still be difficult to make that first step.

In this section, we'll be covering a few tips and tricks to help you start writing up your research in NVivo - for literature reviews and beyond.

The Importance of Code Organisation

In the last two sections, we covered tips on how to better structure your coding for writing a literature review in NVivo. This is really helpful, as it means when the time comes to begin writing, we can easily flick through our files to find the relevant information. By coding our annotations, we are also able to then directly use the text that we've already written to start the process of drafting a literature review.

Iterating your Research

Like with all coding in NVivo, there's a good chance you won't get it perfect the first time around with your literature review. It's better to get this out of the way nice and early. One strategy that helped me was to try to write a short literature review of maybe a couple of paragraphs using a few files in NVivo early in my research process.

In doing so, you can find gaps in what you need NVivo to offer you for your writing. Maybe you need to organise your files by different themes and structures, maybe it's really difficult to find quotes and figures in NVivo as well. Either way, if you get on top of this early by prototyping a literature review, then you'll be a more critically engaged researcher as you build the data for your literature review going forward.

Visualisations

Creating visualisations in NVivo can help to give you a snapshot of your research data. The same holds true for getting a snapshot of your literature review data as well. Using tools such as the Word Cloud and the Hierarchy Chart can help you to quickly access and glide through your literature themes.

Analysing Article Metadata

When NVivo imports files from your reference management software, it also imports metadata about those files. This data is stored under file attributes, and contains information like the author and date of publication. This information can be helpfully visualised and accessed using queries, and can thus help you keep track of trends among authors or fields.

Task: Writing a Literature Review

1. Using the annotations that you wrote in the previous section, begin to write a paragraph of a literature review comparing two of the articles that you have imported.

2. Reflect during this process on what you wish you had available to you in NVivo, and how you might be able to make sure that you would have that information there when you started to write the first complete draft of a literature review