Research notes: a lesson in what *not* to do

Learning things through making huge mistakes: an effective but not very pleasant method. Last week I wrote about overcoming a monstrous case of writer's block near the beginning of my Masters. In that article I mentioned that keeping handwritten research notes turned out to be a terrible mistake. This is the story of that mistake, and what I learned from it.

Why do it in the first place?

Looking back, it seems so easy to dismiss as obviously the wrong way keep research notes, but at the time it was much less obvious. I do enjoy a good paper notebook for certain things like brainstorming, lists, and creative projects, so it wasn't too much of stretch to also include research notes. This was also before my research skills were any good, and my first big reading project was an enormous textbook that had been recommended by one of the module tutors as a good place to start. I concluded that as I was doing a lot of my reading on paper, it made sense to leave the computer out of it as a way to avoid distractions. Maybe I would even remember more if I wrote it all out by hand. Plus it would feel good to fill a notebook with a module's worth of research. This was all starting to sound like a great idea, and I started the module full of enthusiasm.

As I made my way through the first few chapters of the textbook and followed up each important-seeming reference to literature with an attempt to find the original source, my A4-size notebook started filling up at a rapid pace. I thought I was ready for this with different pen colours used for different purposes, and a system of underlining, highlighting, and starring things to make them stand out, sometimes used all at once if something was really important.

Reality sets in

This worked okay for a little while, but after I had been reading into my topic for a few months, the first few issues had started to appear. By this stage I had almost completely filled the notebook, and writing out the full reference list entry by hand for each source that I read had become extremely tedious. When I encountered something in a source that I remembered reading before, or at least something very similar to it, finding that link was a laborious process of manually turning (oh so many) pages and scanning each individual page for the information I was looking for. How I wished my notes were done on the computer then, so I could easily do a few keyword searches and rapidly find what I was looking for. In addition, once I had found which source made a similar point, I would have to write out the referencing info for the other source on either one or both of the pages with the similar information. If there were multiple sources that said the same thing this became even more time consuming. How I wished I could copy and paste referencing information then, or have an easy way to number pages and refer back and forth to entries that way.

Quoting or paraphrasing

As I was writing everything into my notebook by hand, this discouraged long quotes being copied into my notes as it was too time-consuming. Instead I summarised and paraphrased away, keeping only the essence of what I thought I would later need. When I came to write my paper, I would generally start by including whatever paraphrased version of the source I had included in my notes, so far so good. The problems came when I wanted to rewrite those sentences in successive drafts. Now I no longer knew if my second or third paraphrase had somehow returned the sentence back to the original phrasing, meaning I would unintentionally be committing plagiarism. Of course the obvious thing to do was to check the original sources, which I did, but there was one major problem. Perhaps you see this one coming already... As I had not copied the exact wording into my research notes, I could not easily search for the section I paraphrased from originally. I could of course search for my newest paraphrase to see if that existed in the original, but if the phrasing or tense was slightly different I might still not find it and might still be committing unintentional plagiarism. It was enormously time-consuming to check each source like this, and time was of the essence. For some of the sources I never even managed to find which phrase I paraphrased from originally, which added quite a lot of completely unnecessary stress to what was already a very stressful experience.

The paper did eventually get written and got a good score, which I was happy with, but this would be the last time I ever tried to keep research notes using pen and paper. To sum up then, the problems with handwritten research notes were:

1. Not conveniently searchable
2. No copy and paste function
3. No easy page numbers
4. Discourages extensive quoting

What would I do differently?

If I had to do it again, I'd mostly do the opposite of what I did the first time. Here it is, in a bullet list:

• Get a PDF copy of the textbook
• Add it to Mendeley (my reference manager of choice)
• Keep research notes in a Word document
• Read the source in Mendeley
• Highlight the passages I copy into my research notes
• Add any comments or thoughts into the research notes in a way that clearly differentiates them from the source quotes

Is the above method perfect? No, far from it, although the basic steps are probably good enough. The problem for larger pieces of research is that the research notes end up being unmanageable without a good way to organise them. For example, my new problem is that I now have several hundred pages of PhD research notes from about a year of reading into my topic, with each paper appearing in the order I read them in. When I learn how to better organise my research notes, I'll share it here first.

If you have any strategies you think I should know about for organising research notes, I'd love to hear from you. You can reach me at hello@markhubee.com.

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