Using N4, N5 or NVivo with your reference material While you would use a bibliographic program to organise your references and for the 'Cite while you write' functions they provide, it is valuable to use NVivo (or N4/N5) for organising your notes you have made (or even downloaded full text) for each reference to assist you in writing the text of your review. You can have the best of both worlds by using the programs in conjunction with each other. Export a bibliography from EndNote or ProCite that is configured to contain also the notes and abstracts fields (perhaps for a selected set of documents, e.g. sorted by keyword), so you get the extra data you have put in. This will be exported as an .rtf file (by default) or a .txt file (by request), so it can be immediately imported into your project with no further work, or you might choose to add some additional formatting to facilitate retrieval of reference details (see below). If you don’t have a bibliographic database, then use NVivo for recording the notes you make as you read—or record them in Word and then import them into NVivo.

If you are using EndNote, choose your preferred output style, and then request that each reference ends with the Notes and Abstracts fields. Users of ProCite, should select the additional fields (such as Notes and Abstracts) in the Configure dialogue when setting up to create their bibliography.