This way you go through forward and backward citation tracing a number of times till you get to see a set of articles and authors being cited over and over again. Pacheco-Vega (2018) calls it concept saturation where you know that you have got a total pool of resources that you will read and cite from in the first place. So let's say we have run this exercise and we have got to the following article that we will now read:
Li M, Gu S, Bi P, Yang J, Liu Q. Heat waves and morbidity: current knowledge and further direction-a comprehensive literature review. International journal of environmental research and public health. 2015 May 18;12(5):5256-83.
What we will now do is to read this article and abstract information and create a spreadsheet of summarising these articles. But before we do that we need to read the paper closely and construct a standard form to find out hte final conclusion that the article has and its standard form of listing of arguments. This is step 2, so
Step 2. Review the articles and organise the papers that you read
When you do that, you create a spreadsheet with the following headings:
- Citation of the paper
- Synopsis
- Conclusion
- Reasoning
- Evidence
- Your analysis
- Questions to go forward
- Quotations
For the Li et.al. (2015) paper \cite{li2015heat}, let's construct this spreadsheet. You can either construct this directly using a spreadsheet such as Excel or you can write this as a free text and then develop your spreadsheet. You can use a citation management system such as Endnote to write the notes on the paper using this format.
How to write a research proposal: what elements to include
Begin with a precise account of the health phenomena that needs explanation. -- the background
Discuss the significance of knowing this.
Discuss or Start with an explanation. -- Then develop a theory and from the theory build hypotheses
Describe how you will collect data to test your theory.
(if you have analysed some preliminary data then) Describe how your data supports your line of explanation
Acknowledge and list what other explanations might be possible to account for the phenomena you observed
Discuss the limitations of your research approach
Call to Action