As a doctoral candidate writing my literature review, I struggled with keeping track of citations, quotes, and reference information across dozens of sources. The traditional method of managing references felt disconnected from my actual writing process. I’ll never forget those frustrating writing sessions when I knew I had the perfect quote to support my argument but couldn’t remember which source it came from, or I spent precious writing time tracking down publication details for a citation instead of developing my ideas.
The frustration of losing track of important quotes and citations during the writing process became a major obstacle to my productivity. I was writing a comprehensive literature review on technology integration in teacher education, and I had accumulated over 80 sources that were potentially relevant to my work. Each source contained valuable insights, quotes, and findings that I wanted to incorporate into my review, but keeping track of all this information was becoming overwhelming.
My initial approach to citation management followed the traditional advice I had received from my advisors. I used reference management software to store bibliographic information, I kept a spreadsheet of quotes organized by source, and I highlighted and annotated PDFs of important articles. But these systems felt disconnected from my actual writing process. When I was in the flow of writing, I didn’t want to stop and switch between different programs to find the information I needed.
I remember working on a section about teacher attitudes toward technology, knowing that I had read several powerful quotes that would strengthen my argument, but being unable to locate them quickly. I spent thirty minutes searching through different files and folders, trying to find that perfect quote from a study about veteran teachers’ technology adoption. By the time I finally found it, the momentum of my writing had been lost, pdf merger and the paragraph I had planned never felt quite as compelling as it had when the idea was fresh in my mind.
The problem was compounded by the fact that the most valuable information for my literature review wasn’t just bibliographic details or isolated quotes – it was the complex relationships between different sources, the patterns of agreement and disagreement across studies, and the connections between theoretical frameworks and empirical findings. These sophisticated connections were nearly impossible to maintain when working with fragmented citation systems.
