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Assembling a Subject Index that Serves the Author

Mystery writers often plot out clues, scene by scene, in a spreadsheet, later modifying and up-dating it as they write.

Some novelists do that same with characters, mapping out what key players do scene by scene on a spreadsheet. They sometimes spend as much as a year laying out the plot and characters, getting the whole thing in their mind before they begin writing. Others, of course, like Isabel Allende, leave the whole thing to unfold far more spontaneously. Members of the spontaneous group generally allocate almost as much time to rewriting as they do to writing the first draft.

Ideas, concepts, or themes in an academic book or textbook are like characters to the novelist and clues to the mystery writer that they carry across chapters. Nonfiction book writers introduce an idea or a new term, define it, then elaborate on it in subsequent chapters. Returning to a key construct time and time again helps the reader remember it.  It provides continuity across chapters. 

An Index that Serves the Author

Many book authors leave the index of an academic book to the end of a process, often paying someone else to construct it. That was the strategy I applied in my 2018 textbook, An Introduction to Fully Integrated Mixed Methods Research. A topic index identifies what topics are raised most frequently. It provides the reader a tool to trace what an author has to say on a specific topic. An author index provides a clue to whose work has most influenced the author. The two are often merged in a single index. 

Indexes are rarely thought of as a tool that can help an author during the writing process. In my third textbook, Visual Displays in Qualitative and Mixed Methods Research, I experimented with a spreadsheet that listed terms that would appear in the glossary and a tentative notation of when it would be introduced and how it applied to topics raised in subsequent chapters. You can see, for example, in the image the spreadsheet I constructed.  A procedural diagram that captures critical steps in the research process was of sufficient weight to be addressed in chapters 1, 4, 5, and 6. 

Writing a textbook requires several years. It also requires having a clear idea of the role of each chapter. Building and revising an index as you go helps the author of an academic text in several ways:

1. To see the book as a whole.
2. To avoid unplanned repetition. 
3. To provide continuity across chapters.
4. To introduce, then elaborate, a construct, theme, or in a methods textbook a procedure or strategy. 
5. To spot what may have unintentionally been omitted or requires more attention to fit the purposes established for the book.

What an Academic Book or Textbook is NOT

A scholarly book expresses a point of view or standpoint that is evident across chapters. It has a logic and coherence. It has pacing in that it moves from the simple to the complex. 

What a book is NOT, is an assemblage of unrelated topics welded together by a binding.