Using Zotero for analysis of literature

Dear all,
I have some questions about how to organize my articles. I use one folder for every project and then label all my articles for the sake of flexibility.
I am struggling with the structure of my tag system. Could someone give me feedback, that would be great! My idea is:

1. Create an account in database X
2. Add search strings in database X and save the results in the database

Next step is: appreciate the articles one by one: quality of research design, definitions etc. and my collegue needs to do this as well.
How to organize this process?

How about this:
3. I export the results to… Excel? Or Zotero? And then ‘code’ it?
4. Then: my partner needs to do that as well and when we don’t agree, we will discuss it and come to a final set of articles.

5. Then: we need to analyse the articles that we include in such a way that we can compare them on several points.

I cannot think of a more efficient way than importing the reference list from Zotero to Atlas.ti and then code it. But my colleague assumes this to be too time consuming. What is the alternative that takes less time, but still gives us the transparency we need for this literature review? Can we use Zotero for this?

What do you think of this system?

  • Interesting question. Certainly, exporting your pdfs to qualitative analysis software like Atlas is one way to go, but that takes you beyond the scope of this forum. But I guess you could use a grounded approach to build a set of tags that you could then apply back in Zotero.

    Would there be any value in annotating your pdfs and then extracting the annotations in searchable format? Zotfile can do just that (it pulls your comments and highlights into a new note attached to the reference). It's an amazing feature and I find myself using it more and more. Perhaps then you could analyze the annotations in a useful way?
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