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Using prompts to motivate writing: Five strategies to get some words out

I just came back from a week in Paris attending a meeting of field experiments’ scholars, and I took the opportunity to do some fieldwork. There are perfectly good reasons why I study French water governance, specifically in Paris, but that discussion is reserved for another post.

#AcWri at the SFO airport

When I do fieldwork or when I am at conferences, I am often constrained by how intense the workshops are, and therefore I sometimes don’t have the time to write 2 hours per day, as I have on my schedule. I need to be more flexible and take care of my own physique. So I write when I can, often times, on planes or trains or buses during my commutes.

But when I travel for conferences, workshops and fieldwork (obviously becoming quite exhausted) what I also face sometimes is the dreaded blank page. Sometimes I don’t know how to start writing something, despite the fact that when I am editing I always have my Drafts Review Matrix in front of me. So, what I do to motivate me to write is that I use prompts. And coincidentally, as I was researching my own Twitter account, came across this excellent blog post by Nicole Cesare on turning your notes into prompts.

When I see these prompts, these physical cues, these calls to action, I feel prompted to start writing. It’s like I have an opportunity to capture some thoughts and I shouldn’t let it slide. In examining my own workflow, I have identified four different types of prompts.

Prompt 1: A PDF of an article or book or book chapter (external or on Mendeley)

If I feel like I can’t write anything, because I am facing writers’ block (it does happen to me from time to time) I open a PDF of an article or a book chapter. I feel even more compelled to write notes when I am writing on my Everything Notebook or when I have the PDF open on Mendeley. Having Mendeley open alongside Word usually prompts me to write a memorandum.

iPod March 2017 038

Having Mendeley and Word open simultaneously basically forces me to write some words, because if I don’t, I would feel like this travel time would be wasted (I only write on a plane when I’ve actually already had a good, solid nap – my health comes first).

Prompt 2: A data table or textual dataset (on Excel, or a .CSV file)

Datasets are one of the easiest sources for written material, and act as fantastic prompts to inspire me to write, because I need to, at the very least, describe how I assemble the dataset, what it contains, what it means for my research, for the paper I am writing, data sources, etc. Even just describing the dataset will prompt me to write.

Also, as Dr. Adam Wellstead mentioned in response to my tweet, datasets can allow you to use them and reuse them for multiple papers, using different theoretical and empirical strategies.

Prompt 3: A newspaper article or news clipping (from Evernote)

I almost always keep at least 2 or 3 programs open at all times: Evernote, if I am surfing the web or doing a Google Scholar search, or a Google News search when I am looking for specific news clippings related to my research. Mendeley, and Word/Excel. Having Mendeley open at almost all times reduces the excuse that I often give myself to avoid writing “well, I’ll find that reference later“. My good angel brain tells my evil angel brain “NO YOU WON’T. You have Mendeley RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU. Search for the damn reference and insert it RIGHT NOW.”

Prompt 4: A results table

Results are also some of the best prompts to write when you have writers’ block, at least for me, because I know that I already have something that I have analyzed and I need to make sense of them. That’s why having STATA or Atlas.Ti open in front of me helps me feel compelled to start writing those results, to understand why they came out the way they did.

Handwritten notes in academic research

Also, assembling tables of results by hand, as I show above, is one of the ways in which I feel the most energized and compelled to write. Moreover, tables really help me clarify my mind.

Prompt 5: Scribbles on the margins of an article or my Everything Notebook

Because I do a lot of things the analog way, I often need to transcribe notes from the margins of my articles or my Everything Notebook on to a Word file (often combining the literature into a nice, in-depth memorandum). Having handwritten notes acts as one of the strongest prompts for me to write.

iPod March 2017 015

For example, in the case above, my own scribbles on the margins of the paper act as prompts, because I am leaving a note to myself saying that I should check Dr. Arn Keeling (a dear friend of mine who is an urban historical and environmental geographer and who studied the governance of wastewater in Vancouver in the late 1800s and early 1900s)’s PhD dissertation. This is EXACTLY the strategy Nicole Cesare mentions in her excellent blog post here.

These are, as I have mentioned with all my other blog posts, hacks I use to motivate myself. I get distracted, like any other human being, but I use these techniques to bring me back on track. Hopefully they’ll be useful to you if you are facing writers’ block!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 8, 2017

#SA42 – Moving Beyond Work-Life Balance: Self-Care and Well-Being in the Academia #ISA2017

I was invited by Dr. Christina Fattore (West Virginia University) to participate in a round table on the challenges of self-care and well-being in academia, and how we need to move past the work-life balance discourse. As someone who has strongly advocated for a more human, humane academia, I was really excited to participate. Unfortunately, our panel was scheduled for Saturday morning at 8:15am, resulting on exactly what you could have expected: basically no audience, but we were fortunate to have 3 people show up in the end, and they found it valuable. Besides, my co-panelists and I really had a fantastic experience and a wonderful discussion. I live-blogged the entire thing, and made it available here as a Twitter stream using the hashtags of the conference and session code. Hopefully some of the discussions we have permeate globally.


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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – February 25, 2017

TC04: Online Media Caucus – Live Tweets for (Political) Science #ISA2017 #TC04

My dear friend and coauthor Dr. Amanda Murdie (University of Georgia) is chairing the Live Tweets for (Political) Science session at the 2017 International Studies Association meeting (starting 1:45pm Baltimore time). You should join us! This blog post will keep the tweets specific to this session as a tweetstream.

Live tweets for political science

IF you would like to join us, please come to the room, or join us remotely using both the #ISA2017 and #TC04 hashtags.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – February 23, 2017

International Studies Association 2017: A Quantitative Test of the Double Grid Framework #ISA2017

I’m at the 2017 meeting of the International Studies Association conference where Dr. Amanda Murdie (University of Georgia) and I will be presenting our coauthored paper “Environmental NGO influence on domestic policy change: A quantitative test of the Double Grid Framework”. It will take place on Thursday morning at 8:15am. Thursday, February 23, 8:15 AM – 10:00 AM at Room 348, Baltimore Convention Center. Our paper is part of the panel TA37: Environmental NGOs: Influence and Representation, Conflicts and Restrictions.

The role of organized civil society in effecting change in domestic environmental policy can no longer be denied, particularly in a context of global rapid environmental change. Non-state actors’ effectiveness in pressuring national governments may be affected by a number of factors. In this paper, we test the Double Grid Framework as posited by Pacheco-Vega (2005). We follow Murdie and Urpelainen (2015)’s model to evaluate the degree to which varying political contexts and organizational models affect how much pressure can transnational ENGOs put on domestic governments. We use a global dataset of environmental NGOs and countries, and we model governmental response to NGO pressure using regulatory pressure indicators. Finally, we posit hypotheses about which factors lead ENGOs to have a stronger influence on domestic policies of the global South.

If you are at ISA 2017, come to our panel!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – February 22, 2017

Different reading strategies III: Deep engagement

I’ve written before about reading strategies: how to extract relevant information from a journal article or a book chapter (the AIC method); I’ve also discussed how I engage when I can only skim a paper, and a meso-level type of engagement when I have *some* time to read (or I’m doing a preliminary survey of the literature). But there are times when you literally MUST engage with the readings on a very deep level. That’s what I call deep engagement (and what most professors and PhD supervisors expect from their students, be it undergraduate or graduate). In this post I’ll describe a little bit of the process that I use when I have to engage deeply with a specific set of scholarship.

Writing a rhetorical precis

Right now I’m writing a literature review on Elinor Ostrom and Sue Crawford’s grammar of institutions. This is a topic I know it’s relatively unexplored and I also know the authors who have used the grammar itself. So, I chose five articles (including the main one, Ostrom and Crawford 1995) and a few of those who have referenced that article. I knew I needed to really engage with the readings because this is a method that, while I’m very familiar with it, I have still yet to apply in a more systematic way in my own research.

The way I approach articles that I need to engage with rather deeply uses a three-pronged strategy: I book time to read (usually a couple of hours, but there are times when I book an entire day), open a Word file to write an in-depth memorandum, and open Excel so I can simultaneously dump quotations on my Conceptual Synthesis spreadsheet. Since I know I’ll be writing text that I will be using for a paper anyways, I do count this time as part of my 2-hours-per-day block.

Deep engagement (reading)

I also keep related papers on a similar topic physically close to me so that I can write on the connections that each one has. For example, in my reading on applications of the institutional grammar tool, I know four of the authors who have ran codifications of specific pieces of legislation (David P. Carter, Christopher Weible, Xavier Basurto and Saba Siddiki). So I printed out the papers where these authors applied the tool, and read them all within the same session. That way I am able to (a) discern the contributions of each one of the papers they wrote, (b) connect the different pieces of work that are associated with the core concept (Crawford and Ostrom’s institutional grammar tool) and (c) write an in-depth, detailed memorandum that can serve as one of the core components of the main body of a paper I am writing. I also keep Mendeley open as I often need to insert citations into the text of a memorandum, where I use Mendeley’s Cite-O-Matic function.

Highlighting and writing by hand

When I read, I use colour-coded highlighting techniques, where I mark the main ideas in a specific colour and I associate them with their corresponding concept. That way, I can recall, understand and memorize more easily. For example, the method uses a grammar with five different codes (ADICO). So I used five different colours for highlighting each one of the operators AND to scribble notes on the margins (and on my Everything Notebook) that would be cross-linked.

Reading Strategies and Colegio de Mexico and FLACSO Jan 2017 127

The example I show below isn’t specific to the grammar of institutions, but it shows how I cross-link my scribbles and highlighted sections with notes on my Everything Notebook. What I find hardest when engaging deeply with the literature is controlling the urge of jumping to a different topic or another paper (I’ve written before about how hard it is for me to concentrate and why I use a few strategies to regain focus). So when I know I need to engage deeply with the literature, I try to do it during my buffer day (the day I use to catch up on reading). That way, I don’t have any urgent meetings to attend to, any must-do administrative chores, or lectures to prepare. Engaging deeply requires, for better or worse, that we make the time to read, and that we also invest in writing memoranda, dumping quotations on the Conceptual Synthesis Excel Worksheet, and (if necessary) clean up references on Mendeley (as I normally do on a regular basis, as it’s part of the academic grunt work).

Following my three-pronged strategy to engage deeply with the literature generates 3 things, for me: A set of memorandums that I can use as input for a specific paper draft; a set of entries on my Excel Conceptual Synthesis worksheet that also include specific quotations that can help me with the literature review and with drafting the paper, and a set of handwritten notes on my Everything Notebook that I can also use for the paper I am writing. So I do not find engaging deeply with the literature to be a problem or a waste of time, but it is an investment that will pay off as it will be easier (and faster) for me to write a paper since I already have read in-depth and understood the literature that is associated with said paper.

Engaging deeply with readings is a time investment, that IS why I do it.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – February 21, 2017

Should you bring your Everything Notebook to conferences with you?

The short answer: NO, you shouldn’t.

Well, let me adjust that answer – no, you shouldn’t if you are planning on buying more books and adding weight to your backpack. I did, and it was PAINFUL. But I’ve also taken my Everything Notebook everywhere without any problems (I just need to control my desire to acquire books all the time).

Those of you who have adopted my “only use one single notebook for everything associated with research, students, fieldwork, To-Do lists, weekly plans, yearly plans” approach (aka The Everything Notebook) know that I carry it EVERYWHERE. As in, everywhere. I’ve taken it to conferences, workshops, to the beach (during my holidays). But this week, after travelling to Bloomington and Indiana for a full week, I have decided that I will no longer be recommending that my fellow academics bring their Everything Notebooks everywhere. I’ll explain why in the paragraphs below.

I’ve been thoroughly impressed that many fellow academics (students, professors, practitioners, folks who are adjacent to academia) have taken to adopt my Everything Notebook approach.

I am both grateful and excited that my method works for them. As a result, I have taken to analyzing my own behaviour with respect to how I use it and what changes need to be made to make it more efficient. I wrote this post in response to my own assessment of how I felt about bringing a rather heavy Everything Notebook everywhere. I noted on Twitter recently that I travel everywhere with my Everything Notebook and my writing kit (a set of 10 colours’ Staedtler 0.3mm fine liners and a set of plastic hard tabs).

Everything Notebook and travel kit

But this week, I got five books, and I brought along my stainless steel travel mug and water bottle. Obviously, as you add more weight to your laptop bag, it starts creating a strain in your back. I am EXHAUSTED. It’s Saturday (I flew into Indianapolis on Monday, was in Bloomington Monday night, Tuesday and Wednesday and went to Indianapolis on Wednesday night, where I presented at a workshop Thursday and Friday, until I flew back today).

I feel EXHAUSTED.

I wondered why this would be the case, and then I realized as I removed my travel mug, water bottle AND Everything Notebook, that my laptop bag all of a sudden felt MUCH lighter. This is one of the reasons why people seem to be unable to take up the Everything Notebook. If, like me, they chose a very thick notebook to assemble their Everything Notebook, with hard covers and all, it will become VERY cumbersome when bringing it along EVERYWHERE. And their back may suffer, as mine has, all this week.

I figured out something that might help.

As I suggested in this post, on the rare occasions when I have taken notes at conferences and I did not bring my Everything Notebook, I take the following approach: I staple the pages to a blank page within the section of my Everything Notebook where I have filed ideas about a specific project.

For example, as noted in the tweet above, last year I took notes when I was presenting at the Public Management Research Conference, and what I ended up doing was bringing those notes along with me and stapling them to my Bottled Water section in the 2016 Everything Notebook. I explained this idea in more detail in this post.

I still will try to carry my Everything Notebook everywhere if the travel doesn’t become too cumbersome. But right now I’m carrying 5 heavy books in my laptop bag, plus stainless steel water bottle and coffee travel mug, so my back is in pain. Thus, I’ll leave my Everything Notebook at home when I travel to conferences and workshops (where it’s likely that I will buy books) and then just staple the pages to the specific section where they go.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – February 11, 2017

Move Every Paper Forward Every Day (MEPFED) vs Work on One Project Each Day (WOPED)

For many years, I have advocated the Move Every Paper Forward Every Day (MEPFED) model of working. The MEPFED model basically says “every day, insert something related to each one of your research projects/papers on your To-Do list, so that collectively, every week you’ve moved most/all of your work forward“.

Reading

MEPFED has worked for me very well now that I am a professor, but it did even during my PhD days, because I also was working on two other side projects (my governance of wastewater analyses and my transnational environmental non-governmental organizations research) besides my doctoral dissertation work.

I have experimented before with the Work on One Project Each Day (WOPED) model before too. The WOPED model says, give or take, that “in order to keep your concentration, you should work on one single thing per day. That way, your focus on specific theories, data, models, will enable you to finish the paper/project/analysis more quickly“. In fact, my plan this 2017 was to do WOPED, and I basically had it all well laid out: Mondays, my bottled water work. Tuesdays, water and energy. Wednesdays, informal waste pickers. Thursdays, environmental NGOs. Fridays, human right to water.

You can guess how well that went.

The problem I have with the WOPED model is that I get bored quickly. There is a reason why I wrote about the techniques I use to regain focus when I am distracted. Remember, I am an interdisciplinary scholar, working on a variety of topics. I read broadly. I write on a diverse range of themes. I use different research methodologies. So, WOPED only works for me when I am about to finish a paper (usually, when I am on a strict deadline). At that point, I assign ONE DAY to finish a particular analysis, dataset or paper.

Workflow: Finishing a paper

When I was pondering about this blog post, I started thinking about other models of WOPED workflow that I’ve either used or advocated for. For example, I do have dedicated buffer days, reading days, administrative days. But even during my buffer day I catch up. The only way in which I would apply a WOPED workflow would be if I only read (and scribbled, annotated, wrote memorandums, rhetorical precis, or dumped quotations on my Citation Worksheet).

MEPFED works really well when you apply the Granular Planning and Rule of Threes and break down a project into smaller tasks that you can then drop into your daily To-Do lists. For example, my good friend Dr. Adriana Aguilar Rodriguez (Centro GEO) has adopted MEPFED for her own research (photo of her Weekly Project Whiteboard used with permission).

MEPFED model (Adriana Aguilar Rodriguez)

WOPED is very useful when you are able to focus an entire day on one task. For example, I used to only prepare lectures on Fridays, and that’s when I focused entirely on one (or in this case, two) topic(s) (public policy analysis and regional development). You can also apply WOPED by devoting one day to cleaning a dataset or running a particular analysis.

There are two instances where I find that WOPED is most valuable: when I have to finish compiling or cleaning a dataset, or writing a paper or when I have to do fieldwork. I use entire days for fieldwork (as I did a couple of weeks ago), and I usually visit one city per day.

I won’t advocate for one particular model, as I often combine them. But I do still believe that MEPFED allows you to finish projects more quickly, particularly when you are working with collaborators, because you can work on a component of a paper and then move on to another while they work on the stuff you sent them. I do find that WOPED is also useful when I don’t have to switch topics and they are somewhat related. For example, working on the human right to water and on bottled water and on privatization of public water supply is almost so interrelated that I could assign one day to “marketization of water” without any problems. Or for example, when I work on informal waste pickers and then switching to studying sanitation still feels as though I am dealing with related topics. But switching on the same day from polycentricity to the governance of informality in water feels a bit like too much of a jump.

I’ll be testing both models throughout the year and will report back on my experience.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – February 4, 2017

Different reading strategies II: Engaging at the meso-level

In my most recent Twitter poll, I asked what I could write about that would be most helpful to my readers (many of which are undergraduate and graduate students). I was asked to continue writing about reading strategies. The previous post I wrote on was what I think is the fastest technique you can use (and one of the most effective if all you have time for is to write a rhetorical precis on the paper/book chapter. I often use the “skimming, scanning and scribbling” strategy when I’m really, really pressed for time and when I’m looking to see if I can reach conceptual saturation within a literature review I might be writing (see my recent post on literature reviews, conceptual synthesis matrices and annotated bibliographies).

Because I HAVE to be strategic when I read, I choose carefully which articles I engage with more in-depth. Recently, I’ve been reading on the human right to water, on street vendors and waste pickers, on the water and energy nexus, on field experiments, and on environmental NGO mobilization. So when I use my buffer day to catch up on reading, I select a few particular pieces that need to be engaged with in more in-depth, what I call “meso level engagement“. This means, articles or book chapters I do not have the time to read in painstaking detail, but that I recognize may have some important ideas and that I shouldn’t discount. These pieces, almost invariably, end up motivating me me to write an in-depth memorandum.

My process for doing meso-level reading is quite simple. In addition to applying the 3 steps model (abstract, introduction, conclusion) I also choose one or two visible, particularly important ideas per page. I don’t fret over the fact that some articles may have many great ideas in the same page (I will discuss when this happens later).

Regardless of whether you’re doing meso-level engagement reading or skimming and scribbling, I believe you should always be cross-linking ideas and authors. When I was reading for my doctorate’s comprehensive examinations I realized I needed to demonstrate that I had mastered a field. In graduate school, I was even more old-fashioned than I am now, and more analog, so I would write index cards filled with notes, ideas and summaries of specific articles, books and book chapters. Then I would lay them out on a table and map how Author A’s ideas on Concept B would relate to Author C’s ideas on the same Concept B, and how Concept B and Concept C aren’t all that different from each other.

In the case I show above, I found a key idea in the paper (Hayward’s 2016 global right to water piece) where I can easily see how it relates and connects to other themes I’ve been studying (in this case, Risse’s 2014 philosophical piece on the right to water as a moral duty to our planet). Because I can easily see the connections across both articles and sets of ideas, I can now more easily summarize what this (Hayward 2016) article is about. Note that I also link to other literature I’ve read, such as the planetary boundaries body of works.

For me, the litmus test of whether a paper is relevant enough to write a memo about is finding myself at the point where my highlighting is going to go beyond one or two key ideas per piece (see my tweet below). At this point I either start writing the memorandum in my laptop or write by hand in my Everything Notebook, under the plastic tab associated with this specific project (in this case, my Human Right to Water project).

For me, this meso-level engagement often ends up giving me the five or ten key articles, books or book chapters on a specific topic from where I can build a literature review. That’s because when I feel that I must write the memorandum either by hand or computerized (aka when the number of solid ideas I’m highlighting surpasses 2-3 per page) I almost always find numerous connections across themes, authors and topics. I also check the reference list to see if there are cross-references to other key articles.

This method does require a deeper level of engagement than skimming and scribbling, but it also provides a faster route to a solid literature road-map and to reaching conceptual saturation relatively quickly. As far as book chapters and books (and physical copies of journals) I do NOT scribble on the margins, but I use a similar technique to the one shown here by Dr. Lisa Schweitzer, with Post-It notes (mine aren’t as vehement, though!)

Hopefully this series of blog posts on reading strategies will be useful. I am going to send them to my own students!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – January 31, 2017

Finding the most relevant information in a paper when reading: A three-step method (the AIC technique)

It occurred to me as I was writing my blog posts on reading strategies that some people may wonder how to find the most relevant information when reading. I had tweeted about it, but I hadn’t actually written about it. So, I thought I’d write about how I work to find the most relevant information when I’m reading a paper. This applies to articles, book chapters, reports and books. I use a three-step process (and I focus on 3 main elements of a paper) which I call the AIC content extraction.

First off, while many people will recommend reading the abstract first, I don’t necessarily agree that it should be the major source of information. I have found that many abstracts are so constrained by space (100-150 words) that they rarely relay exactly the content of the paper (which ends up being much richer than the abstract posited). I think we always should read abstracts, but be somewhat skeptic of whether they will provide us with the full description of what the paper is about. I wouldn’t write a rhetorical precis based on an abstract, for example!

I do, however, expect that the introduction to a paper will tell me, by the second or third paragraph, what the paper is about. For example, below I noted that the introductory paragraph of a paper on industrial restructuring in the beer industry in Canada tells us the context and the reason for the paper.

Note 3 explanatory elements within the paper:

  • What is the context of this research? Why are the authors doing it?
  • What explains the phenomenon they are studying?
  • The “BUT THIS IS WHY WE’RE DOING THIS” – the WHY that explains what the paper will tackle and the reasons for it.

Some authors will provide then a detailed description of what the paper is about (methodology, research methods, data description, etc.), as shown below.

Other papers will provide you with a summary of Context, Rationale, Method, and Findings within the first few paragraphs, as this paper on the nexus between voluntary and non-profit research and policy studies’ scholarship by Dr. David Carter and Dr. Chris Weible shows.

I always zoom in on the introduction because that’s where I expect that the paper authors’ will set up the entire manuscript. I look for a summary of the paper (again, looking at the context for why this research is needed, the gap in the literature, and what the contribution of the paper is).

One of the suggestions that many scholars and academic writing coaches offer is that one should read at least the following elements if one is in a rush.

  • The abstract.
  • The introduction.
  • The conclusion.

I tend to agree, which is why I suggested that this is a three elements/steps method, though in methodological papers, I tend to focus more on the actual application of the method. But I always expect that the abstract, introduction and conclusion will follow a storytelling model and that they will provide me with a broad overview of what the paper is about (this suggestion applies obviously to larger-size manuscripts, like books).

In the conclusion of a paper, I always expect to find a summary of what’s been done and how, as Dr. Veronica Crossa does in this paper on varying strategies that street vendors used in Mexico City’s Coyoacan to resist removal and eviction.

reading conclusions

Note that Dr. Crossa summarizes the entire paper in the first few sentences of one of the concluding paragraphs, but provides additional context and insights further down.

I find that applying this three-step method (Abstract, Introduction and Conclusion) gives me at least the bare bones of an understanding of a paper. I absolutely do NOT recommend skipping the middle of the paper (methods, data, results, argument), but at least these three elements may provide a tool to decide on whether to do a detailed memorandum on the paper, whether to simply write a rhetorical precis, and what kind of information to look for throughout the paper for your Conceptual Synthesis Excel Worksheet.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – January 28, 2017

Literature reviews, annotated bibliographies and conceptual synthetic tables

I was recently asked by one of my current students to write about how to write a literature review.

I have finally written a sequential list of steps for how to do a literature review in 6 easy steps which you can check here. Admittedly, I have a full Resources sub-page for Literature Reviews.

Now that I have taken the time to write a full Protocol on how to go about the process (from selecting a topic to searching article databases to building the conceptual map for the literature review to actually writing it), in this post I want to highlight the differences between a conceptual synthetic table (my Excel dump, as I normally call it), an annotated bibliography, a bank of synthetic notes/rhetorical precis and a full-fledged literature review.

Writing a memorandum

Components of a Research PaperI do want to emphasize the difference between a literature review, an annotated bibliography, and a conceptual synthesis, particularly because to me, all these can be scholarly outputs in and of itself, and all of them are intermediate steps between conducting a database search, writing a full literature review and completing an entire paper. The figure to the right shows what I consider are the main components of a traditional research paper. I am well aware that different people undertake research in various ways and that my model isn’t the gospel of truth. However, this is the way I have done it for a very long time (even before I did a graduate degree) and it makes a lot of sense to me.

Having a database of article and book chapter citations, a bank of rhetorical precis, an annotated bibliography and a literature review are all solid intermediate steps to writing a paper. What often happens (particularly because I’m not someone who can spend all this time generating the intermediate products) is that I create each one of these for a MACRO (larger) project, and then extract components for different papers.

For example, right now I’m conducting a literature review on street vendors and waste pickers. The first step I am taking in doing this review is to search databases for articles with specific keywords (this post of mine shows you how to do this citation tracing process until you reach conceptual saturation).

The second step I engage in is creating both a bank of rhetorical precis and an Excel worksheet (a database) of citations. You can create the database of citations simply by using Mendeley (or any other reference manager) and dumping all PDFs associated with a specific paper into a folder, as I do with my own papers. Mendeley can automatically generate a list of citations that can be exported as a .CSV

DO NOTE – this Excel worksheet or database of citations is NOT the same as my Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump. The citation database is only a list, with basically no processing.

Both the database of article and book chapter citations and the bank of rhetorical precis are project products, but since they don’t involve analysis (nor synthesis), I don’t count them as scholarly outputs. I often ask my research assistants to build a bank of rhetorical precis with summaries of articles and book chapters I ask them to read and synthesize. I also build my own rhetorical precis’ databases as I often use them in conjunction with my Excel Conceptual Synthesis Dump.

Excel dump sheet

From the figure I show here, you can see that creating the bank of rhetorical precis is often an intermediate step to building a Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump. What differentiates a simple database of citations from a conceptual synthesis is that I extract quotations and sort papers by theme, as I’ve shown on this Conceptual Synthesis for a paper on informality.

Once I have the bank of rhetorical precis and my Conceptual Synthesis, I am well positioned to write either an annotated bibliography (which is an organized set of summaries of articles, books, book chapters that follow each paper’s citation). I normally go from rhetorical precis to annotated bibliography, but you can also draw from your extensive, in-depth memorandums. You can read an example of an annotated bibliography on transboundary water governance here, by Dr. Emma Norman and Dr. Karen Bakker from UBC’s Program on Water Governance.

From the annotated bibliography, once you start stringing together thematic syntheses of ideas and citations, you can build a conceptual mind-map of the literature, and start writing full paragraphs of the literature review. For example, this is a literature review on street vending in three countries (Thailand, Cambodia and Mongolia) published by the ILO.

Again, the difference between scholarly output and project product is that anything you generate during the course of a project can be a product, but what you’ve already processed and put intellectual thought on is a scholarly output.

Literature reviews, annotated bibliographies, and conceptual synthetic tables all are valuable scholarly outputs that can help our own research or that of other scholars, which is why it is important to be able to generate them and do them well. Hopefully my post will be of use to you when you write your own scholarly outputs!

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES ON HOW TO WRITE A LITERATURE REVIEW

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – January 27, 2017