In this post, I walk through how I structure and use a bibliography spreadsheet—from initial setup to prioritization, assessment strategies, and color-coded insights. Whether you’re in the thick of a new project or trying to wrangle a pile of PDFs into something coherent, this system can help you turn “reading” into actual, visible progress.
INTRO: WHY SPREADSHEETS
Smart people all over academe swear by their own choice of bibliographic tools. Zotero. Mendeley, EndNote: citation managers of all sorts are lovely. But that’s not how I work anymore. EndNote once ate my close-to-a-thousand item listing, and while I got most of it back due to my back-up diligence, it took me untold frustrating hours and permanently pissed me off. And Zotero doesn’t appreciate my multiple identities. Wait, which account am I logged in on? Let’s just say, I have developed serious trust issues on the software front.
Thus, I’m a spreadsheet fan. Give me that good, old-fashioned, sortable, controllable overview of what I’m doing, hosted on my home device, and I’m a happy camper. (By which I mean happy scholar; happy camper is NEXT weekend!)
It’s true, I have to remember which spreadsheet had what. And I’m at the edges of managing all the things for the next book, with nested sheets and a sense that I’d better plan a weekend retreat to review it all. But, article-wise, there’s nothing like a spreadsheet to give you a sense of your bibliography!
If you want to focus on how to shape the content of your bibliography, I got a start at describing my technique in my post on jump-starting a scholarly article. Here I focus on what to do once you have a sense of what you want to read. I borrowed some of my approach from Raul Pacheco-Vega, https://www.raulpacheco.org/, and if you like reading about approaches to scholarship you should absolutely subscribe to him. He’s brilliant at sharing how he works, and his approach is enough like mine that I browse there regularly to see if I want to include any recent posts in my course reading-lists.
SET UP THE SPREADSHEET (AND READING PLAN)
My approach to article bibliography starts with mechanics. I open a spreadsheet (for me, LibreOffice has been working, though I will often import to Microsoft Office for sorting purposes later in the process). I generally name the file with at least two elements: a one or two word title, plus the designation “_30day” to remind me that this is the go-fast assessment of the literature.
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| Sample Filenames |
Why 30 days? Well, a 30-day reading
challenge is bite-sized. We can typically pledge to find at least 20
minutes for 30 consecutive days, and if you take 20 minutes a day every
day to say, “what is this thing and why is it important,” you can build
up a picture of your area pretty quickly. So, I generally target having
30 items to start, and then add to it as I work through my reading. (To
keep my momentum, I treat books as a series of chapters, and each
chapter is an “item” on the spreadsheet. Your mileage may vary.)
Why
a consistent naming element like _30day? Well, “Bibliography” tends to
get overused elsewhere in my life – other people’s bibliography PDFs
download that way; students send me bibliographies all the time for this
project or that one. Nobody sends me documents labeled _30day – so
searching on it in my hard drive makes it easy to find!
So now you
have a named file, and a pile of bibliography to enter. I plug
the full
citation into the spreadsheet, one per row, properly formatted to your
preferred style. I’m a modified Chicago practitioner, myself; I keep the
city for book citations, for instance, since some journals require it
and others prohibit it – I clean that sort of thing up at the “final
proofing” stage. And I’m forever forgetting WHERE the page references
come for an article in a collection so I know I’ll have to fix that
later too. The point is to get the details in so you’ve got them to
hand.
And then, I
add the “working columns” for the bibliography. Here’s my header list from a recent project, columns A through R:
• Author, Year, Priority, Status, Citation
• Author's Big Idea, Gap They Fill, Paper Sections
• evidence 1, evidence 2, evidence 3, evidence 4
• quote 1, quote 2, quote 3, quote 4, other,
• cited works, abstract from elsewhere
If
you want, you can download a copy of the
30day spreadsheet template .
As you can see, some columns want to be wide, and others can be
relatively narrow to start. I do a mix of word-wrapping and letting the
text trail off into invisibility as I go; I toggle those features
regularly as I’m working with my sheet. But setting things up gets me
ready to make visible progress, and I’m a sucker for having my work
show-as-I-go. Yay, dopamine.
WORK THE LIST
The good news is
that the first part of working the list is easy to do. This is a great
end-of-day or start-of-day activity since it doesn’t require much
brainpower. Take the first columns --
Author, Year, Priority, Status,
Citation – and plug them in. I find author and year sorting to be
useful, though technically you could manage that with the Citation
column. But that lets me do Author/Date placeholders as I write, and
translate easily to full citation. It works for me.
Prioritizing
is up to you. I tend to choose a number from 5 (read first!) to 1 (read
when I get there). I might have 7 “read first” assignments, but that
just means that it will get done in that first week’s pass.
Status, on the other hand, is a management tool. I’ve evolved my own shorthand if it’s helpful:
- HAVE means it’s a PDF in my file-folder or notes in a file somewhere.
- DONE means I’ve actually assessed it.
- READ ME means I’ve assessed it and want to look at it more closely.
- NOT means I’ve read it and it isn’t right for the current project.
- ILL-Date means I placed an order for it.
- FETCH means I need to head to the library to grab that thing.
- A blank in that space means I have some bibliographic hunting to do
to get on top of it; that often happens with new citations at the bottom
of the list. I save those for brain-dead time.
- AGAIN means my brain wasn’t up to it this time, and I should come back to it later.
ASSESS THE ITEM: AIC READING
AIC
reading – Abstract, Introduction, and Conclusion – is the law of the
land. Seriously, we diligent types were taught to read things in order. But, and here comes a HUGE caveat, reading in order is NOT the best way to get the info to stick. Instead, move
around the article or book chapter with abandon.
Start by reading the
abstract. What does it claim it’s going to do? Then, read the intro, or
the first 3-5 paragraphs if the item lacks subheaders. What’s the
context, what’s the author’s stated task, what’s the thesis? Then flip
to the conclusion: what’s the big claim and why does it matter?
Generally,
I recommend performing an AIC, and then going back and filling out the
next couple of columns: Author's Big Idea, Gap They Fill, Paper
Sections. (I’m serious about the paper sections – you don’t have to
quote the author’s subtitles, but give the gist of how they divvy up
their information. Your later search strategies will thank you.) Each of
these is telling you where they are trying to fit into the scholarly
conversation, and also what will be useful for you in situating your own
work.
This is not a “read every word” process. Be one with that.
By
now, you’ll have spent somewhere between ten and twenty minutes on your
item. Urgent class prep pressing? Household tasks such as making and
eating food on the necessary list? Then you can pause and put a pin in
it. Change your HAVE to DONE or NOT or, very rarely, AGAIN – that last a
designation to tell you to come back to it, perhaps with another cup of
coffee in your system. This is progress, and progress is good.
READ FOR THE EVIDENCE
Once
you have time, move on to a more detailed assessment. Even this may be a
“skim” more than a “read deeply.” Remember my status column? Part of
the overview of the literature is designed to tell me which of the items
I want to prioritize for full reading. They get a “READ ME” status
until I’ve got an afternoon slot or a morning coffee work-cycle to spend
the hour or two to work through details. So your task at this stage is
to figure out how the author is working and what they have to say, and
with what tools.
For this stage, I tend to flop through once,
with an eye for what each paragraph is doing. Is it documentary?
Analytical? Critical-theory based? This information will presumably
marry up with the article sections you’ve already reviewed, and now
you’re learning more deeply what this particular contribution is
offering. As I go, I make comments on the evidence used and on quotes I
may want to integrate in my own writing later on.
This is a kind
of quick-and-dirty notetaking, but I’m careful to put quotes around
quoted material or key phrases, and to put my initials in front of
material that I am saying in response to that bit of the reading.
Here’s a typical entry:
Bijsterveld says: “inalienable objects”…
“they symbolize or represent owners… their power and virtues.”
(Bijsterveld 2007, p. 86). Of these, Bijsterveld lists arms, jewellery,
crowns and regalia, relics, precious and holy books, objects connected
with princely descent, costly textiles, precious materials, names,
stories, sagas, etc: CJC SAYS: all get their power from associative
knowledge – the relational ties of donor/recipient, and the meaning of
the context, not the object itself.
(Bijsterveld, Arnoud-Jan A. Do ut
des: Gift Giving, Memoria, and Conflict Management in the Medieval Low
Countries, Middeleeuwse Studies en Bronnen CIV (Hilversum: Verloren,
2007), Ch 4)
Is it eloquent prose? No. Does it get the
content across in ways I can mentally access it again? You bet. This is
the quick-and-dirty approach. Writing will emerge from this, but this is
only a single stone in the creek-crossing of knowledge-building. You’re
going to need to heft several of these before the path forward emerges –
so don’t get too wrapped up in getting it perfect; focus on getting it
down.
How do I note-take at this point? This is the joy of the
spreadsheet. I
toggle back and forth from evidence to quote and back
again. Occasionally, an item will be SO rich that it actually gets a
second row in my spreadsheet, but mostly those go into the READ ME and
get their own “document” with notes and responses. How do I decide? Mood
of the moment, really. And, I always try to leave enough keyword info
in the spreadsheet that a term search will pull up the right set of
articles.
And then there are last two columns. If you had to
choose 3 items from this person’s bibliography, which were the most
important to them? I give a shorthand citation, unless I decide that I
really need to read it too in which case it gets a short-hand reference
in the right-hand column AND an entry in my own citation column. And, I
cut-and-paste the abstract in if it’s convenient. About a quarter to a
third of items wind up with abstracts cut in.
MANAGE INFORMATION: COLORS AND COLUMNS
But
wait, there’s more. One of the habits I’ve developed that keeps me
moving forward quickly is the use of color. As I take notes, I find that
certain things leap out as important to my own argument. Those cells
become green. There are others that need more thought, or might apply,
or make me mad in one of those “that’s not it” sorts of ways that helps
clarify what I am thinking. Those become yellow (or if urgent, orange),
because I want to come back to them and sit with the idea some more.
I’ve sometimes used urgent red to get my attention the next work cycle
or to track through inter-library loan until that issue is resolved. But
mostly, my spreadsheet is green, yellow/orange, or void.
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| Excerpt from a Shakespeare-related 30-day bibliography for a conference paper, showing the use of color |
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The
orange cell here actuall included 4 things: a quote, a cross reference to another
scholar, my own thoughts, and the details of what I needed to track down
for my argument.
Dr Johnson: "The meek sorrows and virtuous distress of
Catherine have funished some scenes which may justly numbered among the
greatest efforts of tragey. But the genius of Shakepseare comes in and
goes out with Catherine. Every other part may be easily conceived, and
easily written." Perhaps per Hannah Pritchard, recreated role annually
at Drury lane 1752-1761. CJC: the long popularity of the play in
performance speaking against its relative neglect by critics. (Rep of
Sarah Siddons, helen Faucit, Ellen Terry, Ellen Tree, Charlotte Cushman.
Bowers p. 29-30) Similarly, the XXX thatcher and gooch suggest that
the play is more amenable to the sounding and staged interpretations
than the literary ones.
(Bowers, A. Robin. 1988. "'The Merciful
Construction of Good Women': Katherine of Aragon and Pity in
Shakespeare's King Henry VIII." Christianity and Literature 37, no. 3
(1988): 29-51.)
You’ll notice the typos (ewwww, typos) and the short-hand; notes are
not prose! Think of your notes as an action item, a step on the way toward actual argument. Don't polish the stone -- it just needs to get you across the stream.
A second add-on tool is the “additional column”
trick. As I’m working with a given topic, it can be handy to group the
bibliography in various ways. For the prayers-before-an-icon article
that I’m currently researching, for instance, I added both a “category”
column and a “statue” column to my spreadsheet so that I can group all
the “gesture” bibliography, or take a look at everything that includes
statues as a part of their evidence. These are functional project-based
bibliographies, and infinitely adaptable to need.
WHY SPREADSHEETS
And
that brings us to why I spreadsheet to begin with. I don’t always, to
be honest. My kazoo project (ahem, yes, I have a kazoo project) is a
long 20-plus page document file with notes intermingled with the
citations.
But when I want a quick overview, or when I’m trying to ready
myself for writing, I’ll often back-migrate my information into spreadsheet
format. The act of adding keywords or search terms serves as part of my self-discipline, a guarantee that I really actively review my information, and don’t just
look at it. You know, the way one “looks” at things.
Passing
your eyes over something is different than acting on it, and the
spreadsheet, with its columns and colors, retyped sub-headers and great
one-liners, ensures that my reading stays active. It is true that the
cut-and-paste of bibliography across projects can get clunky, since some
will have an extra two columns, and others five, and others none.
Making sure the data align *is* a pain in the neck.
But that’s
easy work, whereas accountability is hard work. Spreadsheets for me are a
tool of accountability, both to what scope I want to have myself have
read, and to what speed with which I want to get this project done.
And
if you find a tool that hits your dopamine receptors on a regular basis
to encourage you to do more of it, in a scholarly-productive way? Keep
using that tool, whatever it is! For me, it’s spreadsheets for the win!
RESOURCES
Cynthia Cyrus, "How To Jump-Start a Scholarly Article: The Plan," Silences And Sounds [Blog], March 22, 2025, https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/03/how-to-jump-start-scholarly-article-plan.html
30-day reading list template: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kx8olonvggdhQk2SK7NuP8_VzRViR39Fhzb-bqPsypI/copy
Raul
Pacheco-Vega website https://www.raulpacheco.org/blog/ , and especially
his resources page https://www.raulpacheco.org/resources/
