This page will share some ideas on how to create annotated literature reviews for Appropedia programatically using Zotero. This page shows the basic functionality of using Zotero without going into detail, to explain how it can be used in the creation of literature reviews by reducing the time you'll spend editing a page on Appropedia.
I hope that this helps you save a lot of time in creating your reviews, including correct citation styles and a recommended format for literature reviews.
Literature reviews are an important part of the work on Appropedia. The reasoning behind them is to learn about a particular subject and previous experiences before undertaking the development of a new project. With this in mind, literature reviews require a lot of time and effort.
Zotero is a tool for managing bibliographic sources and materials. It's a widely used tool in the creation of new research. This means that it's very common to find people who are using Zotero for gathering bibliographic and web sources, as well as for creating reference lists very easily.
Zotero can be used in conjunction with the Zotero Connector to gather the relevant materials being researched, for example: web sites, academic sources, or technical briefs. While it is powerful enough to gather the relevant metadata for many sites, it is important to complete the missing metadata (such as author information and licenses) for the materials being searched.
Zotero collections or folders are a useful tool for organizing materials pertaining a single research project. It is advised to organize all materials into a folder that can later be organized into a literature review for a specific research assignment.
Zotero has the ability to create notes for each reference as you collect and organize them. We will use this function to annotate for every source being tracked.
To create a note, select an entry of your library and switch to the "notes" tab. These should contain useful information for your research. According to Pearce (2018)[1]:
For your literature review, we recommend that you create it as a subpage under your main project page.
Once you've created notes to a list of items in Zotero, you can export them by doing the following:
This section explains how to do it programatically.
Please note that you must review any missing data warnings that will be shown when importing the .bib file entries for the script to work correctly. If there are any errors, go back to Zotero and fix the entries before trying again.
Check this page for a literature review created using the code below.
require(bibtex)
library(rvest)
library(dplyr)
require(stringr)
require(RefManageR)
require(lubridate)
bib <- read.bib(file = "items.bib")
bib_csv <- read.csv("items.csv")
f_bib <- format(bib)
f_bib <- str_replace_all(f_bib, "_", "''")
f_bib <- str_replace_all(f_bib, "\n", "")
f_bib <- str_replace_all(f_bib, "\\*", "'''")
bib_csv$clean_notes <- gsub("<.*?>", "", bib_csv$Notes)
bib_csv$clean_notes <- paste("*", gsub("\\s{2,}", "\n* ", str_trim(bib_csv$clean_notes)))
item_types_dirty <- c("journalArticle", "webpage", "bookSection", "magazineArticle", "book", "forumPost", "report", "conferencePaper", "thesis", "blogPost")
item_types_clean <- c("Journal article", "Web page", "Book section", "Magazine article", "Book", "Forum post", "Report", "Conference paper", "Thesis", "Blog post")
item_types <- bind_cols(dirty=item_types_dirty, clean=item_types_clean)
for (i in 1:nrow(item_types)){
bib_csv$Item.Type <- ifelse(bib_csv$Item.Type == item_types$dirty[i], item_types$clean[i], bib_csv$Item.Type)
}
# Create the review
final_vector <- vector()
for (i in 1:nrow(bib_csv)){
final_vector <- c(final_vector, paste0("===", bib_csv$Title[i], "===\n{{Card|title='''Source''': ", Cite(bib[i]),
"<ref>", f_bib[i],
"</ref>|content=
* '''Item type''': ",
bib_csv$Item.Type[i],
"\n*'''Retrieved on''': ", date(bib_csv$Date.Added[i]), "}}",
"\n====Notes====\n", str_trim(bib_csv$clean_notes[i]),
"\n"))
}
final_text <- paste0(final_vector, collapse="")
final_text <- paste0("This is an introductory text about the goal and scope of the literature review, for example, the parent page (in this case, [[{{BASEPAGENAME}}]]) and the search keywords.\n== Literature ==\n", final_text, "== References ==\n<references />")
write.table(final_text, "clipboard", sep="\n", quote=FALSE, row.names=FALSE, col.names=FALSE)
If this process works well, it might make sense to create an online tool to turn Zotero bibliographies into wikitext, perhaps through the Zotero API.
