How to generate a literature review matrix

veronicalm
Hi, I am doing a literature review and trying to create a review matrix, i.e. a csv file with publication meta data and manually entered data such as methodology, sample size etc., from which I could then sort and filter elements (e.g., tags) in different ways to view the literature and identify patterns. I wonder if anyone has any tips on how to achieve this using Zotero? Any tips are appreciated! Thanks!
  • adamsmith
    You've found Zotero's CSV export I assume? That'd be the starting point.
  • veronicalm
    Yep, thank you! I still need to trim the table every time I export the references and I wonder if there are more efficient ways of doing this, such as only exporting selected fields (and making it default)? I also look forward to the function of user defined fields... Thanks!
  • bwiernik
    The translator could be customized to only export certain fields. What do you want to have included?
  • veronicalm
    Thank you! I'd like to include author, year, title, journal, extra(citation) and tags. I also wonder if there is a way to organise the tags so that I could easily filter records and potentially visualise counts of tagged info in the csv export? Right now I don't know how to easily visually the tag counts (e.g. bar chart, cross-tabluation etc.), but perhaps this is beyond what this forum could cover. Just in case anyone has some tips to share (that would make my phd life much easier...).
  • bwiernik
    For tags, you can use Excel (or whatever program you are using for analysis) filter feature for rows that “contain” a tag. You can similarly use pivot tables or a similar feature to compute counts.

  • veronicalm
    Thank you! That's really helpful.
  • miguelbaratagoncalves
    Hi! I was searching for this topic and just found this post.
    I also would like to "only export selected fields (and make it default)" and also, if possible, to create more personalized fields, but I can't see how to customize the translator... Also, for the tags and annotations, when I export a .csv file and open it in Excel I cannot see my annotations.
    Can you please post a small tutorial with the steps?
    Thank you!
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