Not within a PhD, but as a side project I work on a research project on wikiversity about grammatical gender in French. It does reference a bunch of books and academic works, like probably a hundred I guess. The most tedious work though is to check which nouns are used only in a single gender of do have some epicenic or specific inflection used in the wild and giving a reference that attest that when it's not already so consensual that most general public dictionary would already document the fact. For that the research refers to thousand of webpages. I'm glad that most of the time I just need to drop the DOI, ISBN, or page URL and MediaWiki will handle the filing of the most relevant fields. That's not perfect, it generates the output with many different models currently (some don't have an excerpt field), and some required fields might be left blank, url to pdf won't work, and so on. But all in all it make the process of taking note of the reference quick and not going too much in my way. Creating a structured database out of it can certainly be done later.