As you research, you will find articles, books, and other sources that look useful for your paper.
It is important that you have a way of keeping track of sources that you think you might use in your paper. There is nothing worse than knowing you found the perfect article or book and not being able to remember the title or where you found it.
Here are a few tips that can help you organize and save your research:
- Create a folder on your computer or in Google Drive/OneDrive as a separate place to keep downloaded pdfs related to this project.
- Keep a list of titles and authors to make sure you can find sources again if you don't/can't download them
- Write down specific page numbers or sections that seem important.
- Some classes use RefWorks to organize sources. You can export information from OneSearch directly into RefWorks, then use it to create your citations. You can also upload PDFs and use their reader to highlight and take notes.
In a typical research project, you can expect to do some searching, read some sources, change your topic a bit, do some more searching, read some more sources, realize that you need more information about part of your topic, and keep going through this cycle. If you save any sources that might be useful, you'll save yourself time in the long run.