Until fairly recently I have been very old fashioned when it comes to research methods. I collect articles and print them out, read them, take notes in a notebook and go from there. I did not really need to organize beyond that because my memory is pretty good when it comes to remembering a source for something I read (meaning I rarely had to even look back to the notebook if I needed to track down a bit of knowledge).
But now my bibliography for my Viking research has grown to four pages of sources (some of which are massive books) and I can no longer remember what came from where in that sea of knowledge. When I recently came on the idea that I wanted to compile an annotated bibliography to share with others, I realized I could use some help and that lead me to do a different type of research... one to find a tool to help me organize my collected mass of data.
There are several premium products on the market, such as EndNote, and a host of "free" products as well (Zotero, Qiqqa and Mendeley). I finally decided to look further at these and based on the amount of free storage space and ability to use it on an iPhone/iPad, I chose to test out Mendeley.
Wow. I never in a million years thought that organizing my books and articles would be so easy! I import a PDF and the program often is able to compile the base data (author, publisher, year) itself. I can then add tags, notes and I can highlight passages and annotate those. I am overjoyed! It will take me some time to enter everything, make notes and highlight items, but eventually I should be able to export my bibliography to share. Yippee!
http://www.mendeley.com/
If you are interested in looking at some of the other options, here are the links for those as well:
http://www.zotero.org/
http://www.qiqqa.com/
http://endnote.com/
And while I am speaking of research, it seems that quite a few people are just now finding Academia.edu (a site that houses research articles). I had assumed that the whole world knew about this resource but apparently not. Quite often I have found some of the same articles there that are housed on Jstor (which is inaccessible to most folks). Enjoy!
But now my bibliography for my Viking research has grown to four pages of sources (some of which are massive books) and I can no longer remember what came from where in that sea of knowledge. When I recently came on the idea that I wanted to compile an annotated bibliography to share with others, I realized I could use some help and that lead me to do a different type of research... one to find a tool to help me organize my collected mass of data.
There are several premium products on the market, such as EndNote, and a host of "free" products as well (Zotero, Qiqqa and Mendeley). I finally decided to look further at these and based on the amount of free storage space and ability to use it on an iPhone/iPad, I chose to test out Mendeley.
Wow. I never in a million years thought that organizing my books and articles would be so easy! I import a PDF and the program often is able to compile the base data (author, publisher, year) itself. I can then add tags, notes and I can highlight passages and annotate those. I am overjoyed! It will take me some time to enter everything, make notes and highlight items, but eventually I should be able to export my bibliography to share. Yippee!
http://www.mendeley.com/
If you are interested in looking at some of the other options, here are the links for those as well:
http://www.zotero.org/
http://www.qiqqa.com/
http://endnote.com/
And while I am speaking of research, it seems that quite a few people are just now finding Academia.edu (a site that houses research articles). I had assumed that the whole world knew about this resource but apparently not. Quite often I have found some of the same articles there that are housed on Jstor (which is inaccessible to most folks). Enjoy!
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