Christina Silver from the University of Surrey and Founder & Director of QDA Services spoke about literature analysis. They noted that there are many methodologies and also many tools in MAXQDA. Silver said literature is text with images and therefore qualitative data. Reviewing literature is a form of qualitative analysis. Silver has done a series of spotlights focusing on different features of MAXQDA that can be used for literature review. Tailwind has capabilities of automatic summarization, topic identification, summary tables, and researcher-requested topics across articles. AI Assist within MAXQDA can help explaining selected text passages, summarize segments and documents, suggest codes, and chat with documents and coded segments. Silver shared how AI summarization with Tailwind can help review studies. Currently, Tailwind has a cap on the number of documents (20) and characters (~20,000) that it can analyze. Tailwind has an automatic topic identification feature that can be used to dissect articles. Users can then access the sources and edit titles/topics. Tailwind can also find topics that are interesting to users: researcher-requested topics can be added along with a description. Through various rounds of topic retrievals, a user can obtain up to twenty topics, said Silver. Summary tables can be filtered and used to quickly compare items. Summary tables can be exported from Tailwind and then imported into main MAXQDA. In MAXQDA, articles can be displayed in the native PDF format. AI Assist can define terms. AI Assist can suggest codes via selecting a segment of the data. Silver finds it useful to select the abstract of an article and obtaining code suggestions. Summarize Coded Segments can be applied to one document or across documents. Additional instructions can be provided to direct the AI to focus on differences, for example. Chat with coded segments, Silver noted, can be powerful to identify inconsistencies. Chatting with a document can help locate gaps. Silver suggests starting with Tailwind and then moving into MAXQDA. Silver warned that this is not a replacement of reading articles.
