RE: Closing the Digital Research Circle (Using Zotero and NVivo for research)
The following is my response to Dr. Christopher Long's posting on Closing the Digital Research Circle.
Here are what I am doing:
1)Use Zotero to keep all references and PDF files on my main laptop (needs FF)
2)Change the PDF file names using the "Rename file from Parent Metadata" function
3)Convert selected PDF files into Word documents using ABBYY FineReader or ABBYY PDF Transformer. (These ABBYY products are amazing in converting PDFs to Word docs.)
4)Import all the documents to NVivo, which is an excellent qualitative research tool
5)Log on to the the main laptop from anywhere by using any device that has a remote desktop feature (I know that iPad also has several apps that allow you to do this)
6)Start annotating, categorizing, and classifying the content.
--> You can keep everything on one computer and annotate documents using NVivo. Your synthesis work becomes a lot easier this way, although it requires some conversion work.
Dr. Long has commented on my
Dr. Long has commented on my reply basically mentioning that the above steps are too much for annotating. He suggested using Mendeley, which I thought great. I hope to introduce this awesome tool on my blog.
I responded to him as follows:
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I did not know about Mendeley, but I've tried it upon your suggestion. It is a great tool! I would say that Mendeley is a combination of Zotero and PDF Reader, which are good for reference management plus annotation. Also, I found that Mendeley is great for sharing documents among a private group. As far as I know, Zotero does not allow a group to share actual files. Although I heavily rely on Zotero, I see myself using Mendeley for group projects.
I believe that using NVivo is a different story as it is a serious qualitative research tool. Like your reaction, I would not use NVivo to review and annotate a small number of documents as it involves multiple steps. However, if you need to analyze and synthesize approximately 10 or more articles or scripts, perhaps NVivo would be the most effective tool. I know that the developer (QSR) of NVivo is trying to make this process simpler.
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Thanks for sharing, I Think
Thanks for sharing, I Think that is what I have been looking for.
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