Organizing Research
From Hortulus
How do you organize your research? I have a couple of different simultaneous organizational methods that seem to work together well. I use Endnote (bibliography software) to record general notes on each book/article I read, and to keep track of what I need to get the next time I go to the library and what search terms I have used to find the sources I have found. In addition, I use a wiki to keep more specific notes. You can get free wikis from lots of different places, and essentially have your own tiny wikipedia (or Hortulus!). What I really like about using a wiki is that I can link pages to each other, and reorganize my notes as I go. If I were using a traditional notebook, it would be full of cross-references and revisions and would get really confusing and bulky. But with the wiki, I can link different ideas to each other, I can assign categories and tags to each page, and it's really easy to revise my notes. I guess it's a good indication of how habits of thinking have changed with the omnipresence of computers--my brain naturally wants links and tags, and the old notecard system just doesn't cut it for me any more. Morgan 17:31, 15 July 2008 (PDT)
- Morgan - how does Endnote work? I've never heard of it before, but am looking for a good way to store and organize research. At present, I'm the last of the dinosaurs, keeping an annotated bibliography hand-organized in a Word document and a lot fo yellow legal pads!!
- Hi, Melmes! I moved your comment from the discussion page to here so that it would be easier to follow the conversation. Endnote is really nifty. It lets you collect all the bibliographical information about a book. You can also keep all of your notes on the book right there along with the bibliographical information. Then, it works together with Microsoft Word: as you are writing your paper in Word, you tell it to add a footnote to the currently selected source(s) in Endnote, and it automatically creates the footnote according to whatever style you tell it to (Chicago, Speculum, MLA, etc.). It keeps track of when you need "ibid" or a full or partial citation. It literally saves a day of work on every paper, because it does all the formatting for you. You can also search your notes, which makes my life a whole lot easier. I know there is other footnoting software out there in addition to Endnote, and I don't know if others are better or worse, but I do know that I can't imagine ever writing a paper without it again. Morgan 23:14, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
