In addition to organizing the literature, you also have to read it! It is a good idea to your own set of notes about each source as you read. This process yields useful record so that you can remember the details of the studies. A systematic approach for summarizing literature is to develop an abstract for each source. An abstract is a summary of the major aspects of a study or article, conveyed in concise way (about 350 words for this purpose). Be careful not to use the abstract provided at the beginning of a journal article. It is usually too brief to be useful for this purpose because of word limitations imposed by journal editors. Also, if you use it as is written, you need to directly reference it so that you do not plagiarize the authors. You should write your own summary abstracts of articles and materials to avoid plagiarizing someone else's words and to prepare an abstract that is useful for your purposes. Here is a good strategy for taking notes that abstract a quantitative research study. For each source. you might identify the:
reference to the source,
research problem,
purpose, research questions or hypotheses,
data collection procedures, and
results or findings of the study