Guidelines

Generating a network of primary citations

1. From the literature you have collected, select all the articles that are published in what you consider are the top two or three journals among those represented. From these articles, select those that have been published in the most recent year. These are the ones you will analyse first.
2. Examine each article to identify which item from the literature is the most important to the author’s study. This is the primary citation for that article. Do the same for the other articles published that year.
3. Place all the primary citations for the most recent year as nodes in an oval text box at the bottom of your diagram and use Author (Date) to label them.
4. Repeat this process at five-yearly intervals to add new nodes to the diagram that reflect the year of publication. Draw links between nodes to identify the literary antecedents (similar to a family tree). Identify the node that lies at the core of the literature (the one with the most ‘descendants’) by putting it in a rectangular text box. This allows you to illustrate the theoretical framework that unites the literature.
5. The final step is to determine the motivation for each article, and the methodological rationale that links them.

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