Research Guides: Quick Start Guide to Library Research: Organize Your Sources

Research Organization

Phillips Library does not subscribe to any particular citation management tools. These tools can be helpful, but they should not be used as the be-all and end-all. If you choose to use a citation manager, please do a careful review of your citations prior to completion of your work to ensure that your citations:

are complete
are in the correct format
reflect the most current edition of the style standard

Strategies for Research Organization

How to Organize Sources (Boston College Libraries)

Includes note-taking strategies and a guide to successful use of summary, paraphrase, and quotation.

Using Microsoft Word

Create a bibliography, citations, and references

Add citations in a Word document

Using Word's References tool to format a bibliography

Methods for Organizing Notes & Source Materials

Using Spreadsheets
Using Notecards

The Note Card System (Gallaudet University)
"When you are faced with starting a research paper, the most important part of researching and beginning to write is organizing the information and your thoughts. If you are not organized, it will take considerably more time to write the paper. To make it easy on yourself, you can use an index card system as you gather information. With this method, you categorize the information you find by topic. For each topic, you could have any number of cards from several different sources. Later, as you write your paper, each card topic becomes a body paragraph (supporting idea) in your paper."