How do you do research?

[schneefink]

It occurred to me today that I should have asked this much sooner: How do you do research for papers? If you have multiple sources (books, journals, printed and online) for multiple chapters, how do you make sure you find the references you need?

In the beginning I used colorful stickers for books, but that doesn't make it easy to find that one specific quote among the thirty or forty stickers.

Then I started making notes on paper, topic + site, which brought the problem that all the sheets were lying around on my desk and it took very long to find the one I needed.

This time I'm making notes on my computer, source + topic + page, and then I made a new document and sorted all the references by topic under the respective chapter headlines. It looks quite useful, but I haven't started writing yet.

Maybe there's an even better method that I'm missing? How do you do it?

Comments

[busaikko]

The outlining/organizing program All My Notes Organizer, which I got as a freebie and loved so much I paid the $20 or so to keep forever.

It allows you to use files and pages to keep track of stuff, and also search within it. (I use it for fandom, and it's like a prosthetic canon brain, but for keeping mountains of data easy to manipulate, it's a lifesaver.

[schneefink]

That looks interesting. I might check it out, thanks :)