Renan C. Marques - How do I organize my references?

How do I organize my references?

In my first post, I would like to share a Notion template that I have been using. It has made my student life so much easier and far more organized. I invite you to try it out! Trust me, this will save you a lot of time when writing a literature review or organizing everything you've read or came across.

January 7, 2022

Keeping organized notes is always a challenge when faced with huge amounts of papers, books, and all sorts of references. This challenge gets especially difficult when you're first diving into a new field. After I discovered Notion, my literature review's workflow has gained efficiency. If you still haven't used or heard of Notion bare with me for a couple more minutes. Give me the chance to show you how useful my Literature Organizer Template can be and how much it can make navigating the academic life easier.

By the end of this short blog post if you're still not convinced of using Notion you can still create a similar "Literature Organizer" on Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets.

What is Notion?

Think about Notion as a plain textbook. The company describes its own product as "a single space where you can think, write, and plan. Capture thoughts, manage projects, or even run an entire company - and do it exactly the way you want." It's an online organization app in which you add texts, tables, lists, and databases to blank pages. You're free to create the environment which best suits your needs. On their website, you can download Notion for free or use the browser version.

Now let me guide you through my Literature Organizer!

First of all, this Literature Organizer is not supposed to be a substitute for the regular bibliography and citation tools such as Zotero, Mendeley, or Evernote. Rather, it should be a complementary tool to record notes and highlights of each paper you read. I recommend that you keep using your preferred citation app to save and cite articles. However, the template I'm sharing will come in handy when you need to go back and remember everything you read and synthesize findings of a specific field of study.

The Literature Organizer is structured in a way that you can search for key terms, group, or filter the references by category, sub-topic, reading status, relevance, and type. This can be done using the options which are in the upper right corner of the table.

Every time I come across a new reference source, I immediately add it as a new line to the database. The columns are quite self-explanatory. The more specific and detailed you are when filling out each information, the easier it will be to search, filter ou group by the column you choose.

Each cell in the "Citation" column can be opened as a separate page (as shown below). That's where I make a short summary of the paper. The template I use suits papers in applied economics, however you're free to change the headings according to what makes more sense to you or your field of study.

It may seem a little bit more time-consuming at first, but it will definitely make your life easier when searching for a paper you've read a while ago or organizing a literature review on a certain topic.