Qualitative data analysis software (QDAS) programs are well-established research tools, but little is known about how researchers use them. This article reports the results of a content analysis of 763 empirical articles, published in the Scopus database between 1994 and 2013, which explored how researchers use the ATLAS.ti™ and NVivo™ QDAS programs.* The analysis specifically investigated who is using these tools (in terms of subject discipline and author country of origin), and how they are being used to support research (in terms of type of data, type of study, and phase of the research process that QDAS were used to support). The study found that the number of articles reporting QDAS is increasing each year, and that the majority of studies using ATLAS.ti™ and NVivo™ were published in health sciences journals by authors from the United Kingdom, United States, Netherlands, Canada, and Australia. Researchers used QDAS to support a variety of research designs and most commonly used the programs to support analyses of data gathered through interviews, focus groups, documents, field notes, and open-ended survey questions. Although QDAS can support multiple phases of the research process, the study found the vast majority of researchers are using it for data management and analysis, with fewer using it for data collection/creation or to visually display their methods and findings. This article concludes with some discussion of the extent to which QDAS users appear to have leveraged the potential of these programs to support new approaches to research.

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Research outputs across the academic disciplines are almost exclusively published electronically. Organizing and managing these digital resources for purposes of review, and with the technical savvy to do so, are now essential skills for graduate study and life in academia. Paradoxically, digital and web-based technologies provide greater ease and efficiency with which to gather mass amounts of information, while at the same time presenting new challenges for reading, analyzing, organizing, and storing resources. Students, scholars, and the librarians who support them must adopt and refine practices to convert from paper-full to paperless literature review. This article proposes a methodical, reproducible, three-stage process that harnesses the power digital tools bring to the research cycle, regardless of the user’s preferred platform or operating system. Focusing just on the literature review phase, we develop a conceptual framework, illustrated with concrete tips and advice for storing and organizing, reading and annotating, and analyzing and writing. We demonstrate how a researcher’s self-selected suite of tools may be used to complement and even overcome the limitations of comprehensive academic literature and composition platforms such as Docear and F1000Workspace, especially regarding qualitative data analysis software for analyzing and coding research literature. Using these techniques, librarians can become teachers and research partners supporting the skill development of faculty and students.

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