Literature review

[Robert Dewhurst]

I am a research student in the UK.

I am starting my literature review and want to record and document my
findings in Access.

I thought there may be a standard package that did this but I cannot find
anything. I have tried writing my own but run into problems at the design
stage.

What I want is simply a list of authors, book titles and references and my
notes on them.

I have started by forming 3 tables viz. author, publication and notes.

Even though several authors may have the same publication I feel it may be
simpler to say one or one collection of authors has many publications, and
each publication may have many notes.

Can anyone advise me how if my reasoning is sound, and how to progress.

Regards
Robert Dewhurst

 

[Nikos Yannacopoulos]

Robert,

If I visualize this correctly, the relationship between authors and
publications here is a calssic many-to-many case. The trick to handle
such a case in a relational database is to insert another table in
between, which has a one-to-many relationship on each side. In your
case, the tables could look something like:

tblAuthors
AuthID (Primary Key)
LastName
FirstName
....

tblPublications
PubID (Primary Key)
Title
Year
ISBN
....

tblPublication_Authors
PAID (Primary Key)
PubID (Foreigh Key)
AuthID (Foreigh Key)

with each foreign key joined to the primary key with the same name in
the corresponding table. Obviously, for each publication there will be
as many records in tblPublication_Authors as the associated writers.

Now, your notes should have their own table, so you can have many per
publication:

tblNotes
NotID (Primary Key)
PubID (Foreign Key)
NoteDate
NoteText
....

If you wanted to take this a step further you could add a table:
tblPublication_Types
TypID
TypeDescription

and link it to table publications with a TypID (foreign key) field in
it, so you can query/report by publicaton type. Likewise, you could use
a table for Publishers etc.

HTH,
Nikos

 

[Larry Daugherty]

Hi Robert,

Given your tables for your main entities: tblAuthor and tblPublication you
need a junction table tblAuthorPublication to make the many to many
relationship work. I don't know exactly what your thinking is on the notes
but it seems to be that tblNotes should be the child in a parent/child
relationship with tblAuthorPublication. I am assuming that you may have
several notes about this author in this publication. With a form/subform
setup you can find an Author then choose from existing publications or add a
new one and all of the notes for an existing publication would appear in
your subform. For a new Author or Publication the subform would present
just one empty record.

HTH