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This guy didn't organize his research and look what happened. (Source)
Here we are. We've successfully brainstormed without needing to call FEMA, we've learned how to search for good sources and evaluate them, and we've tactfully smashed all that together to make a thesis statement. We're standing at the top of a vast pyramid of knowledge, Kings and Queens of all we survey. So it's probably time to sit down and write the paper, yeah?
Nope. Not at all. Because, before you go riding off into the glorious sunset of paper-writing, you're going to need more information to support (or alter) your thesis statement. That means—you guessed it—research. Lots, and lots of research.
But how are you going to keep track of all your lovely, mind-blowing research? Maybe it's no big deal to remember your sources when you're writing an adorable three-paragraph response or looking up stuff for your take-home exam, but once you get into real 7-10 page research paper territory, it's a serious challenge to keep all your notes, sources, and citations sorted. You don't want to get lost in a muddy swamp of information.
In this lesson, we're going to talk about the three magical things you have to do to organize your research: 1) keep your thoughts and ideas in one place, 2) pick a system to keep track of the sources themselves, and 3) make sure to back up all your junk. Because, seriously, if you lose all your research in a freak computer accident, you'll end up looking like this.
HOW TO WIN FRIENDS & ORGANIZE RESEARCH
HOW TO WIN FRIENDS & ORGANIZE RESEARCH
KEEPING TRACK OF IDEAS
Like I said, the first step in getting yourself organized involves keeping track of your ideas and thoughts and wild surmises as you research. Even if you don't have a formal method for writing it all down, you probably have a lot of stuff swirling around subconsciously while you research.
As you read an article about learning disabilities in New York, you might be asking yourself, "How does this relate to my project on alternative education strategies?" Or maybe you're scanning a government website on immigration, and you see that one tiny statistic that'll be perfect for your paper on African refugees in the 1990s. Imagine how much more efficient and effective your research process could be if you actually saved those clever thoughts of yours. I'll walk through a few different strategies here, and you can pick the one that makes you feel all fuzzy inside (in a good way...maybe).
First, we've got the good old-fashioned write-it-down-on-paper-with-a-real-lead-pencil strategy (I guess sparkly pens are cool too). This method's got a lot of advantages. For large research projects, it's a great idea to have a dedicated research journal, which you keep by your side through every visit to the library or Google search. The kinds of things you should include in your ol' fashioned journal are:
A record of searches. I can't emphasize this one enough. In the course of a research project, you'll run approximately 800,000 keyword searches (or maybe around 15). If you write down the search terms you've already checked and the engines you used, you'll be much happier.
Random thinkings. You'd be surprised how much the simple act of writing it down can clarify and improve your thought processes. And when you read through it later, you can use those handy-dandy notes to generate ideas for your paper.
Important quotes/ideas. If there's some key nugget of information in a source you're reading through, jot down the name of the source and the tidbit of information. Be very careful to distinguish between paraphrasing and directly quoting, so you don't accidentally plagiarize later.
Maybe you're not a pen and paper kind of soul. For the more technologically-friendly among you, I recommend a simple word-processing document. Essentially, all the same kinds of information go into the Google Doc that went into the journal.
A few things to consider:
Cons: You might not always have the document with you and ready when you're browsing library shelves, and the ability to copy and paste into a Google Doc makes plagiarism scary-easy.
Pros: You can copy and paste quotes and source info directly into the doc, and you can search it for certain words when you're done (it's the Find button, or CTRL/CMD F). Totally brill.
You get the idea. Have some kind of freeform place where you can keep track of your ideas and thoughts and research.
KEEPING TRACK OF SOURCES
The sources themselves, however, shouldn't be stored in a freeform way at all. They should be organized in a beautiful, categorized, searchable database that's so brilliant it eventually becomes self-aware and rises to conquer mankind (for example, see every sci-fi movie ever). Luckily, I've got a few programs, apps, and strategies to help you create that perfect organizational system.
First, let's talk about what your system has to be able to do:
When you find a source, you need to save all the information you need to find it again. Online, that means the URL, author, date, and publishing website.
You'll want to have a way of categorizing that source so that you can find it easily again. Maybe only 10 sources are ultimately useful to you, but you've actually looked at 60. Yeah...you'll want them to be in some sort of order...
You'll want to make notes—either in your database or in your research journal—about how that source might be useful to you.
When it's time to write, you'll need to be able to quickly find and cite those sources.
Could you do all that in a Google Doc? Probably. But it's not great, because copying and pasting all that stuff is a hassle, and it can be hard to save and organize everything consistently. So, here are some other systems. Note that the activity might or might not but definitely does ask you to choose one of these systems and try it out.
The index card system. This method is as old as the hills. Or at least as old as index cards. It's also pretty air tight. The idea is that you use one notecard for each piece of information you find that you want in your paper. You write down all the bibliographic information for the source, the category it fits under in your paper, and the relevant tidbit of info. Check out the page below for more details on how to organize your notecards.
Microsoft Excel OR Google Sheets. Sometimes, the most useful way to organize your research is to put it in a giant table, where each source has all its bibliographic information plus the relevant bits of information on one row. That's what Sheets/Excel lets you do. If you're familiar with these spreadsheet programs, here's a great article on how to use them for this purpose.
Programs designed specifically for research. It turns out there are techy programs designed to do all this magical organizational stuff for you. But only a few of them are any good, and it can also be a serious time-waster to fiddle around with new programs just to organize your research. So, if you're going down this road, I 10,000% recommend Zotero. It's free, it works, and it's easy to use. Here's their introductory video, for the interested parties.
BACKING UP FILES
When you're working on anything more important than your high score in Candy Crush, you should save your stuff. Then, once you've saved it, save it again. Then save it to a titanium jumpdrive and put that jumpdrive in a safe and bury it and build a fort around it. Because, no matter how risk-free you think you are, it's always possible for your computer to be eaten by crazy viruses, dumped in a pool of jello, or seized by the Department of Homeland Security for suspicious activity. For those reasons, it's a good idea to back up your files.
You can either back things up physically by saving them to a jumpdrive or external hard drive, or by using the interwebs. On the interwebs, there are websites Google Drive, DropBox or Microsoft OneDrive that let you save your stuff in the magical corporate cloud.
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