By Jacqueline Dirks

As you locate sources and begin to assess them for the bibliography and paper, you will need to develop some technique for keeping and organizing notes on specific works. There is no single system for taking and organizing research notes, but if you have not learned or developed some practical method you should do so now.

It is nearly impossible to write a good research paper, much less research a year-long senior thesis, without systematically reading sources and making notes on the relevant information therein--there is simply too much information to keep track of. (If you do not believe this, consult a current Reed senior, especially one in the Division of History and Social Sciences.)

Many students have come to rely on highlighter pens, sticky note or making notes in the margins of course texts. These methods are inefficient and mar the books--indeed, margin notes can destroy fragile primary sources--and hence are bad habits to get into. In marking up books, the reader does not force herself to really pick out the most important sentences or evidence. (Most of us have all purchased or
seen used books from Powell's whose previous author has highlighted whole pages.) Identifying key sentences, passages and sources, and transcribing that information to legal pad, note card, or word processor, forces you to pay close attention to the author's argument. Taking notes also allows you to organize and reshuffle material as you work on your paper. Marking the books requires you to keep them near you
at all times, an expensive proposition given the cost of academic books and library fines.

If you do not take legible and complete notes on your thesis sources, it may be difficult for you to identify where you got an idea or quotation, and thus to give proper credit to the author. Failure to properly cite or acknowledge others' ideas is known as plagiarism. Students in all disciplines must learn how and when to cite their sources in order to avoid plagiarism. This is the most important professional standard in all disciplines.

You will need to keep track of different kinds of notes, including those for your ideas, direct quotations from primary and secondary sources, and general background information on your topic. Regardless of the form of the note, there are a few standard guidelines that you should keep in mind. Always write down the complete citation for the work you are taking notes on. Standard citations for books include the
author's (or authors') full name, complete title, publisher, place of publication, and date the book was published. Standard citations for articles give the author's full name, title, name of the journal, volume, number and date of the journal, and the page numbers of the article. (For standard formats for other kinds of publications, refer to the latest edition of Kate Turabian's A Manual for Writers (6th edition, 1996)
or the Chicago Manual of Style (14th edition, 1993). These writing guides will also tell you, for example, how to cite articles in edited collections or works with multiple authors.

For proper citations for electronic sources, adapted from the Chicago Manual of Style guidelines, see Haines Brown, Chicago Style of Electronic Documents. It is especially important to find some way to distinguish direct quotations from other kinds of notes on reading. As a writer, you are responsible for giving appropriate credit to your sources by using footnotes or endnotes and bibliographies. You are
also responsible for faithfully conveying the author's meaning when you quote from another's text. This means accurately transcribing the sentences or passage you wish to quote. (If you are not sure that your notes for direct quotations are correct, you should check the original source to make sure.) Also avoid using ellipses ( . . .) to connect disparate sentences or passages. Find a direct quotation which supports
your point and do not mischaracterize or misrepresent the author of the text you are quoting from.

As you take down the information that pertains to your topic, you will need to store and organize it in a way that allows easy retrieval when you write and revise your paper. If you don't already have some note-taking technique that works for you, you should use the Junior Seminar as an opportunity to develop a system. This will not only enable you to write your junior seminar paper, but will be of greatuse as you research and write your senior thesis.

To get ideas about developing a note-taking system, ask others what has worked for them. You might want to experiment with using notecards or indexed notebooks, or check available note-taking programs that are compatible with your word processor.