PALNI Information Literacy Modules

Most problems with citations begin at the note-taking stage. Three common problems are:

1. Notes lacking enough publication information to find the original article and/or passage in the article (or NO notes!).
2. Notes that jumble summary, paraphrase, direct quotation, and/or your own commentary.
3. The avalanche of web browser tabs. It's 3 am, and you're copying and pasting quotes from 17 open tabs.

Needless to say, finding and organizing your notes and corresponding research is key to a successful research paper.

Select a tool for organizing your notes

Paper Index Cards

(Jazz DiMauro, Everyware Notes, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Go with the old standard. Paper index cards are a simple and straightforward way to help organize your research and a favorite among many researchers. Make sure you have a system in place for how to organize the information on the cards as well as how to organize the cards themselves.

Basic Online Tools: Google Keep, Trello, etc.

(sagesolar, Google Keep note art, CC BY 2.0)

Select an online tool to organize your research. There are many free and simple to use tools available. 

One example is Google Keep, a Google product of online sticky notes. These notes are shareable, searchable, and taggable, which makes them very useful for research and projects. They integrate seamlessly with Google Docs to help you organize your research and take notes.  

Another online tool, Trello, organizes your research into individual cards. You can provide notes, links to sources, and images within each expandable, electronic notecard.

Advanced Online Tools: Citation Managers

(Karin Dalzie, Zotero up close, CC BY-NC 2.0)

Zotero, Mendeley, and RefWorks are online cloud applications to collect, organize, and format citations (as well as the actual sources themselves!). They can download full citation information from anything on the web, store and organize citations in folders, and create in-text citations and full bibliographies according to citation styles (MLA, APA, etc.) in your paper. While they take some upfront time to set up, they will save you time in the long run.

Make sure to thoroughly annotate your citations.

(Vossler, 2016)

1. When you find a promising article, before you do anything else, write down all the publication information. If you use Word or Google Docs, copy and paste this information from the website or database. If you use a Citation Manager (i.e. Zotero, Mendeley, or RefWorks ), you can export this information directly from the web into your citation manager.
2. When you encounter a useful passage, before you do anything else, put down the page number(s) where you found the quotation. If the article has no page numbers, put down the section number or heading.
3. Then, either:
   • Put down the author's words verbatim, with quotations marks ("") around them, to make it clear to you that these are all the author's words (If you leave out a chunk of text, note missing text with ellipses (...)).
   • OR summarize or paraphrase the passage. Mark a big S or P to indicate summary or paraphrase. If you use a phrase verbatim, put quotation marks around it.
4. If you want to make a note about the passage, do that as well, but mark ME next to it, to indicate that these are your own words or ideas.
5. Repeat, as often as necessary. Some articles may produce a dozen notes; others only one.
6. When it's time to write the paper, use the note system as you need it. Having a system in place makes it easy to insert author, year, and page # citations as you write, and makes it easy to differentiate between the author's words and your own words and ideas.