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Strategies for handling information/literature overload
Practical steps for getting organised
- Start to Identify a list of ‘inclusion criteria’ to help limiting how much literature you may need to screen through. Things like:
- Age or schooling context (Preschool, Primary, Secondary, Primary Secondary) of group studied
- Geographical locations of significance
- Types of data collected in the studies
- Time frame of importance, etc.
- Know the strengths of your chosen specialist tool/database to help you identify only the literature that identifies studies meeting the above criteria
- You could use things like search filters (such as for qualitative or mixed methods studies).
- Focus on the leaders (seminal authors) within your specific field first.
- Make use of a citation index such as Web of Science, Scopus, Dimensions or Google Scholar to help you with this task.
- Or find those papers that are in reference lists again and again.
- Prioritise articles to read into 1 – High; 2 – Medium; 3 – Low
- For 1 – read full article and summarise
- For 2 – read abstracts only
- Many powerful reference managers and other tools are available to help you save time and make you a much more efficient researcher.
- When you use your reference manager for note-taking and annotation, you can later export the references as well as the notes to a spreadsheet (CSV or Excel) and save yourself lots of time - just adding further columns as required and hiding/deleting columns you no longer need.
- Keep a document alongside your chosen reference management system to provide you with a chronological record of the development of your search process and thought process.
- These two together are very powerful researcher companions.
Reference Management Tools
