Good researchers stay focused and organized as they gather information from sources. Before you begin taking notes, take a moment to step back and think about your goal as a researcher—to find information that will help you answer your research question. When you write your paper, you will present your conclusions about the topic supported by research. That goal will determine what information you record and how you organize it.
Writers sometimes get caught up in taking extensive notes, so much so that they lose sight of how their notes relate to the questions and ideas they started out with. Remember that you do not need to write down every detail from your reading. In fact, it is better to take notes on the main ideas and annotate based on your thoughts. If you find an especially interesting quote, but it isn't a main idea -- just highlight it and write down your thoughts about it -- again, just like a conversation. These might help you develop your analysis and explanation when drafting your paper. Focus mainly on finding and recording main ideas and important points that will help you answer your research questions.
The following strategies will help you take and organize notes efficiently.
Use Themed Headings and Color Coding to Organize Ideas
If you created a mind map or KWL+ chart during any part of the early phase of thinking about your research paper, you may have already pre-identified some themes that you might focus on while you are reading. Inevitably you will find other repeating opinions or thoughts about the topic. You might also find some that stand out on their own as an innovative way of looking at the topic. For instance, when Miguel researches his question about low-carbohydrate diets, he will likely find opinions about energy needs, the standard American diet (SAD), and synthesis of fats and carbohydrates while burning calories. He also will likely find various people's personal experiences with such diets. He did not expect to find information about the carbohydrate needs of people going through various disease process, such as fighting cancer, however. When Miguel found in a couple of different article that the carbohydrate needs of people with certain diseases were different from the average person, he identified a new theme and an unexpected viewpoint. He added this to the subtopics he planned to cover.
As you read, you will inevitably find some recurring subtopics, opinions, or themes regarding your research question. If you have a large number of sources. and they are printed or in an e-reader with annotation tools, it can be helpful to identify and color code for these themes, especially if you are a visual learner. You can do this by matching a color of a sticky note or flag or e-highlighter for each theme you identify. Then, as you read, along with your written annotations, you can place a flag, sticky note or highlight in the appropriate color on that page for that theme. Usually, research papers are organized by subtopic or theme, so as you develop each section later on, you can more easily find the relevant points each writer makes about the topic or theme. This will help avoid the "patchwork" problem that occurs when you just try to works with one author at a time rather than one theme at a time. You will also more easily be able to find your reactions and thoughts about each topic.
Example
Central Question:
Why Is No One Doing Anything about Violence Against Native American Women?
Native American women’s voices
Strange Law Enforcement Boundaries
Bad Statistics
Colonization
Psychology of Trauma
Exercise 2
Choose a color for each theme/major topic in your notes. As you read and annotate, place a sticky note in the relevant color wherever you see that an author is writing about that theme/major topic. If you are using an e-reader, highlight the quote or section of the text with that highlighter color.
Maintain Complete, Accurate Notes
Regardless of the format used, any notes you take should include enough information to help you organize ideas and locate them instantly in the original text if you need to review them. Make sure your notes include the following elements:
- Heading summing up the main topic covered
- Author’s name, a source code, or an abbreviated source title
- Page number
- Full URL of any pages buried deep in a website
Throughout the process of taking notes, be scrupulous about making sure you have correctly attributed each idea to its source. Always include source information so you know exactly which ideas came from which sources. Use quotation marks to set off any words for phrases taken directly from the original text. If you add your own responses and ideas, make sure they are distinct from ideas you quoted or paraphrased.
Make sure your notes accurately reflect the content of the original text. Make sure quoted material is copied verbatim with no mistakes. If you omit words from a quotation, use ellipses to show the omission and make sure the omission does not change the author’s meaning. Paraphrase ideas carefully, and check your paraphrased notes against the original text to make sure that you have restated the author’s ideas accurately in your own words.
You may also want to start a document where you begin to organize your notes by topic or theme (not by author). In your document, using bold headers so you can easily find them later when typing in notes, type in the themes or topics that you have identified. Then, after you read a source, place the quote or paraphrase you identified while reading, along with the important source information mentioned in the bulleted list, above, in that section. If you wrote down an annotation with your thoughts along with the quote, make sure you get that into your document (you may or may not use it later).
Here is an example of what that document may look like during the process:
Central Question:
Why Is No One Doing Anything about Violence Against Native American Women?
Indigenous women in the U.S. and Canada have been experiencing an extraordinary amount of violence and murder for years, but only recently has their plight been receiving some media and government attention.
Native American women’s voices
Brown, Alleen. “Indigenous Women Have Been Disappearing for Generations. Politicians Are Finally Starting to Notice.” The Intercept. 2018, May 31. Retrieved from theintercept.com/2018/05/31/missing-and-murdered-indigenous-women/.
Strange Law Enforcement Boundaries
It is difficult to gather information because of the patchwork of laws and authority from various jurisdictions (the tribal authorities, local police, state police, and the FBI and Canadian federal police).
Bad Statistics
Healy, Jack. “In Indian County, A Crisis of Missing Women. And a New One When They’re Found.” New York Times. 2019, Dec. 25. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/25/us/native-women-girls-missing.html.
Also, when record-keeping does happen, many Indigenous women are miscategorized and, thus, are not recognized as Native in the statistics
“Activists describe the crisis as a legacy of generations of government policies of forced removal, land seizures and violence inflicted on Indigenous people. Hundreds of the missing never return, and families said they have struggled to find counseling and treatment for those who do. Some are trying to cope with the trauma of being trafficked. Some are confronting addiction or grappling with violence they suffered on the streets. Some had fled abuse at home and do not have a safe place to welcome them back” (Healy).
Colonization
So there a number of questions here – who is luring women and girls (or just taking them) to be trafficked and why has so little attention been paid to this problem? Part of this issue is the more than 500-plus-year legacy of brutal colonization.
Psychology of Trauma
Alvarez, A. and Bachman, R. Violence: The Enduring Problem. 2017. Sage.
Could such treatment of Indigenous women (no matter who the culprits are) be a matter of learned behavior that is passed down through generations (Alvarez and Bachman)? It seems that’s partly possible because otherwise how would outside people know whether to go to kidnap women on a reservation?
Exercise 3
After you have annotated your texts(s), create a document in a word processing program with color-coded headers for each of the themes or sub-topics you have identified. Place the relevant quotes or paraphrases under each header with the source and page number, and write down your thoughts about that quote or paraphrase
Know When to Summarize, Paraphrase, or Directly Quote a Source
Your notes will fall under three categories—summary notes, paraphrased information, and direct quotations from your sources. Effective researchers make choices about which types of notes are most appropriate for their purposes.
- Summary notes sum up the main ideas in a source in a few sentences or a short paragraph. A summary is considerably shorter than the original text and captures only the major ideas. Use summary notes when you do not need to record specific details but you intend to refer to broad concepts the author discusses.
- Paraphrased notes restate a fact or idea from a source using your own words and sentence structure.
- Direct quotations use the exact wording used by the original source and enclose the quoted material in quotation marks. It is a good strategy to copy direct quotations when an author expresses an idea in an especially lively or memorable way. However, do not rely exclusively on direct quotations in your note taking.
Most of your notes should be paraphrased from the original source. Paraphrasing as you take notes is usually a better strategy than copying direct quotations, because it forces you to think through the information in your source and understand it well enough to restate it. Also, the majority of the information in most research writing is paraphrased, so it is a good skill to practice. In short, paraphrasing helps you stay engaged with the material instead of simply copying and pasting. It will also allow you to synthesize the ideas more easily later when you begin planning and drafting your paper. (For detailed guidelines on summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting, see "Summarizing" and "Working with Sources").