This blog post will help answer that question by taking a look at the advantages of using Excel and some specific variations (including the popular one mentioned above) that you can use to create your own system. Why all this enthusiasm for a decidedly old-school piece of software that most people associate with accounting? The spreadsheet method is popular, too: one recent Twitter post on an Excel setup garnered over 1,500 likes and 272 retweets and comments from other academics. However, more and more academics now seem to be using spreadsheets instead. Traditionally, this matrix was often created as a Word document, and you’ll still find many templates available online. Many university guides on the subject recommend creating a synthesis matrix for keeping track of sources, ideas, and quotations. So, it’s no surprise grad students frequently post questions like the following on Twitter: The literature review for your thesis or dissertation requires keeping track of sources, their important points and their links to each other – for hundreds of articles, books, and other references.
Pros and cons of using a spreadsheet as a literature tracker
