Literature reviews and bibliographies made easier with NVivo 9

Data is changing and you’ve told us you’re working with it in more forms than ever before. Many of you also work with this data in other applications, and need to more seamlessly transfer it to and from NVivo. We’re addressing this in NVivo 9, and we’ve already revealed that you’ll be able to work directly with spreadsheets and databases from applications such as Microsoft Excel and Access. Now we can also reveal that NVivo 9 will allow you to work with data from software that lets you manage bibliographies such as EndNote.

Seamlessly work with the information gathered in literature reviews

In a recent QSR survey, many of you told us that you were using NVivo to assist with literature reviews. This involves collecting and analyzing all the literature on a specific topic, which is often managed using specialist applications such as EndNote or Zotero. When NVivo 9 is launched in October 2010, you’ll be able to directly import EndNote XML files and work with this information in the software. There’s no need to double handle your data or convert it before importing it.

Consider a project on climate change for example. Your literature review may have involved the collection and analysis of hundreds of articles from scientific journals all over the world. You’ve recorded citations to these articles in EndNote, along with notes about each article. The citations include information such as the name of the journal, the date of publication and the author. When you’re ready to start your project, you’ll be able to import and work with all of this information in NVivo 9, including the article that you may have stored in EndNote.

Developing a bibliography has never been easier

Not undertaking a literature review? Instead, at the end of your project you may need to generate a bibliography which is a list of all of your citations. In this case, all of the information you’ve collected about your bibliographic references can be easily exported from NVivo 9 into EndNote, allowing you to format your bibliography using a citation style.

Importantly, you can also work with your EndNote data in NVivo 9 too. For example, you could run a ‘query’ to search for all of the journal articles published in the year 2000 that have content coded to the theme “industrial activity”.

(Source: QSR International)