It has been a great pleasure doing academic research in the passing year as a DBA student! I've figured out an effective solution of ‘Mendeley+Xmind+Excel’ that works fine for my doctoral research projects.
Mendeley
This tool is to enable the one-click download of literature from all kinds of web pages, and to manage all academic literature either from the one-click download or upload pdf. files from my laptop; and to interact with its plug-in on Microsoft Word for the auto-generated bibliography in the format, say APA 7. It can be accessed via Mendeley.com, the Apps on my Windows 10 laptop and mobile phone.
This is a super convenient and must-have tool for academic research, though it can be replaced by Endnote, by the way.
Xmind (a great mind-mapping tool)
This tool to collect all quotes and classify them into three groups of ‘What’, ‘Why’, ‘How’, one “.xmind” file for one research topic.
The file could go big but never go messy. It depends on how to get used to it. Usually, writing a paper is all about writing the ‘what’, ‘how’, and ‘why’ for a specific research topic, following a conceptual framework that links the keywords (i.e., search terms) into a relationship chart. Based on such understanding, I always sort all quotes about the research topic into three sessions ‘what’, ‘how’, and ‘why’ on Xmind. Under each are the keywords (or the sub-topic you’re going to write about) and their relative quotes, e.g., if the research topic is about “The Theoretical Mechanism of IoT Business Model from Ecosystem Perspective”, the hierarchy structure on Xmind can be organized in this way: IoT Business Model - What? - IoT (or, Business Model, or Ecosystem) - definition - (lots of quotations), or “IoT Business Model” - What? - Research Gap - (lots of quotations) … and so on. In this way, it’s very easy to find the quotes I need immediately, for any paragraph about a sub-topic with lots of choices of in-text citations, from what I copied and pasted from the literature stored in Mendeley.
Tips. Make sure next to every quote, write down the author’s name and publication year, so you have a better idea of who you are going to quote from and how recent the quote was; moreover, once you need to check further the context of this quote to get a better idea of what it is about, you can easily use the author name (or the quote itself) to search on Mendeley and find the original paper; or after you wrote a sentence with an in-text citation based on the quote, you can use the author name to insert the citation, say in APA 7 format, automatically, to save you lots of time.
Excel
This tool is to list all literature to be cited in Title, Author, Year, Citation, Publisher and H-index, one sheet for one specific project, classified by keywords. The relevant information such as citation, publisher's H-index is what Mendeley ignores, they can be used as a filter to decide which literature should be kept for review, and they can be extracted to some relevant statistics sheet, for the Methods session of the working paper.
So when I start writing a paper, these three tools all appear on my screen. They are combined to be my best assistant. The more I'm getting familiar with it, the more I enjoy and feel satisfied with it!
Cheers!
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