Skip to content


Search Results for: workflow

Literature Reviews

While literature reviews are part of just about every single scholarly manuscript, I thought I’d put together a collection of blog posts that I have been writing to teach my students how to undertake a literature review. This page links all the posts associated with how to write a solid literature review, from searching for […]

Organization and Time Management

This page is intended to collate my posts on time management, organizational skills, and workflow design. I have written about how I organize my books, my journal articles and book chapters, how I approach digital document management, and how I plan my academic and personal lives. If you’re looking for my Everything Notebook™ posts, click […]

Academic Writing (#AcWri)

This page is dedicated to suggestions I provide to improve scholars, professors and students’ writing. These tips have worked for me, and I hope they will work for you! Producing New Text Writing a paper (going from generating ideas to finishing and editing manuscript) This post should be useful to those who are trying to […]

My Everything Notebook – planning my research and writing output

I have very odd methods of doing things, I recognize this. I don’t follow anybody’s “time management system”. I adopted many of the tips that are now praised in the methodologies that “Getting Things Done“, “the Bullet Journal” and other productivity systems boast since I was a child, and I’ve faithfully kept my working habits, […]

How to respond to reviewer comments: The Drafts Review Matrix

As I have been sharing my academic workflow with my blog readers, I realized that much of what I have been writing may be of help not only to PhD and Masters’ students, or early career scholars (postdoctoral fellows and assistant professors) but also to my own undergraduate students. I have decided that I will […]

Synthesizing different bodies of work in your literature review: The Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump (CSED) technique

Since I’m writing a series of posts on literature reviews (and undertaking a few of my own), I figured I could expand on how you can combine citation tracing, concept saturation, results’ mind-mapping with a method that Professor Elaine Campbell showcases in her excellent post “How I use Excel to manage my literature review“. I […]

How to do a literature review: Citation tracing, concept saturation and results’ mind-mapping

There is a number of academics (and coaches and consultants) who have both a strong presence online and do a marvellous job of writing excellent blog posts as guidance for undergraduate, graduate students and early career professors. Two of my favourite who write specifically about literature reviews are How To Do a Literature Review (written […]

My #AcWri strategies: Write memos about readings and about research

When I was in undergraduate (I studied chemical engineering), it was bizarre for my male colleagues that I would have such neat printing and that my notes were always drawn in different colors and clearly differentiated. For example, when I drew distillation towers, I would use purple for the distillate and pink for the vapor […]

Making time to read to improve your academic writing

Reading is an integral part of academic life. We expect our students that they read journal articles, book chapters, books and other materials as background to our lectures. But with the haste of academic life, it looks like the only times when we actually engage in reading scholarship is when we need to engage in […]

Making time to read and reflect: Writing a literature review

While I would like to say that I’m able to stretch the 24 hours in a day to fit in time to read EVERY DAY (which is one of the pieces of advice I don’t think I could ever give, much as I’d love to do it myself), I do try to make time to […]