Retrieve system

Simone80

Hi,

I wonder how to deal with the following situation that you might recognize:

I am in the orientation phase of my literature review.
Before I start my ‘official’ search for literatur in a database, I come by accident across an article (or actually many) that

a) contains a specific section that seems relevant, e.g. X is a problem, which supports my problem definition

b) contains references to back up this problem definition, that might be relevant for me

So: I want to add it to Zotero, in my project folder.

BUT

! I don’t have the time yet to appreciate the quality of the article, or to apply my exclusion criteria
! Nor do I have the time to read the other references, but I do want to do that later.

What tags can I use to retrieve this article and even the exact sections I found relevant in this article?

What I have tried now is:
- I tag it with: not yet appreciated
- create a note and name it e.g. “Def self management”
- copy paste quotation in the note.
This enables me to search for all the notes with the title: “Def self management”.


However this is not as efficient as e.g. coding it in atlas.ti: if I want to compare the definitions, I still have to copy all the definitions to really compare them and write notes about differences and so on. While in atlas.ti it’s easy to see them all together. How would you deal with this?

adamsmith

You can filter by tags in Zotero (tag selector on the left), if that's the question, so you could absolutely see all the notes tagged with Def self management -- but obviously Zotero doesn't substitute for QDA software (e.g. no hierarchical codes/tags, much harder to tag individual phrases, etc.). There's a reason those are different software packages.

Simone80

Thanks Adam. I have 'designed' a workflow for my literature study that uses both Zotero and Atlas.ti. Hope it will work:)