Notetaking Part 1: The Literature Grid – Transcript

This is a transcript of the video "Notetaking Part 1: The Literature Grid", hosted on YouTube.

Transcript

[QUT intro graphic]

[Title slide: Notetaking: Part One - The Literature Grid]

[Jenny] Hello and welcome to this note taking session. You know we started to collect a lot of information and particularly after AIRS 2. So what has to happen now is to be thinking about how to organise that information. Because it's really great finding the information, but then what do we do with it. I mean if we were to leave it in a pile somewhere that would be so hard, wouldn't it, to actually find what you need when you need it.

What we need to do as a higher degree student and anyone who is doing comprehensive searching is to have an organisational strategy. It's really thinking about your system of organising information.

What will that look like? How do you think? How do you actually organise information, say, in any other aspect of your life?

So it's worth giving some thought to. And today we're going to actually look at how you might record information about the information that you're gathering. These are tried and true methods that other students have used. Other researchers have used and continue to use. These will continue to see you in good stead over your research career.

Here we are, we have firstly "citations". So where did we get this information from? That's a really important aspect to note down because it will actually assist us not to plagiarise or inadvertently plagiarise. So that's a really important thing. So we're going to write down "citation" here.

[Slide 1: Citation] Citation. A citation tells where the information came from, add the full reference details so you can refer back to the source easily.

[Jenny] Often, it's important to know what the methodology of the article is. Or the methodology that they've used to create that research. Or to collect the research. So we'll have "methodology".

[Slide 2: Methodology] Methodology. It's important to know what the methodology of the article is, or what they've used to create the research.

[Jenny] What I'd like you to really think about doing is as you're reading your articles, you need to be thinking about analysing that information. So the analysis is a really important part of your first, even your first take at those papers. So you might actually give it some sort of star rating as you're going. So we might have "analysis" here or it might be an overview.

[Slide 3: Analysis] Analysis. Create an overview, your perception of the material and incorporate your own rating system.

[Jenny] What was your perception of that paper or that report or that chapter, a book chapter? We might then think about coding it or theming that information in some way. And sometimes you might give it a label. The label might be pertinent to the chapter that you're writing in your thesis, for instance. It might be a "theme", it might be a "code", it could be a "label" here.

[Slide 4: Theme, Code, Label] Theme, Code, Label. What are the major themes, codes, and labels that highlight relevant keywords/section of the literature review?

[Jenny] So there's some really good ideas of some of the columns you might use. There are others as well. So you might use "limitations".

[Slide 5: Limitations] Limitations. Identify the limitations and how they shape the research results.

[Jenny] What is the limitation to this article? So that's a really important aspect because I think what we can do is that we can just read the article without considering the limitations and sometimes the limitations will actually lead you onto the gaps. So, is this a gap in the literature? Which hopefully your research is going to fill.

[Slide 6: Gaps] Identify the gaps and how they provide opportunities for further research.

[Jenny] So that's one way, that's call a literature grid.

[QUT outro graphic]

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