Organizing your ideas while critically reading literature is vital to ensure that you effectively use your time. Doing so will save you a lot of stress and headaches when you sit down to write a research paper or a thesis. Taking your time to arrange information, key concepts and data that you find while reading may seem like a lot of work, but by developing an organized system to structure your ideas and information you gather from the literature will make your writing process smoother, easier, and faster.

A lot of us are prone to highlighting or underlining information when we read. Whether you are reading a printed article or a PDF file on your computer, highlighting and underlining important information may seem like a good idea, but what good is identifying useful information in a text if you do nothing with it until much later? You are not helping yourself by simply highlighting or underlining information with the expectation that you will remember it all later. Why, after reading dozens, or even hundreds of articles, books, reports and so on, would you ever want to reread those documents months later?

If you have ever highlighted or underlined information, and waited a few days, weeks or even months before you use that information in an essay, you have already experienced how hard it can be to find that specific information again when you actually need it. Not only do you need to find the correct paper, but you also need to sift through a lot of highlighted or underlined information to actually find what you want to use at that moment. Then, you still need to create a citation and build your reference list while working on a first draft of your essay. Really, you’re adding a lot of extra, unnecessary work for yourself. This research approach is a waste of your time, but even if you are guilty of overusing the highlighter or pen, there is an easier way.

Organizing your information and ideas WHILE reading, and building a citation and reference list as you pull information out of a text source will save you a lot of time, and will help you develop a stronger analysis. We call this approach the Write and Cite system. Now, there is no single way to use this approach, but the key idea is simple.

When you begin reading an article, book or publication, any time that you want to highlight or underline important information, you should move that information into a separate document. This could be a notebook, it could be a Word or Google Document, or anything else. What is important is that instead of simply highlighting the information, you begin organizing it into a document that will allow you to easily find the information again, when you actually need it.

One approach is to organize the information under a general theme, concept, or title. Such a title could be “Core Research Concepts,” “Definitions” or a more specific title or theme. You should do this because categorizing text sources will make it easier to find and use that information when you are ready to write.

After you finish reading a literature source and have organized and categorized the information in a way that will be useful for you later, make sure that you add a citation and create a complete reference for the source material. Connect the citation and reference with the information you have pulled out, in the organized document. This way, you can easily find and use this information in your final assignment, while verifying exactly where that information came from. Creating proper citations and references is important so that you avoid unintentionally plagiarising. If you plagiarise, either intentionally or unintentionally, you may fail your assignment, fail your course or even be expelled from NMBU.

The Writing Centre has created an online tutorial on how to write and cite to avoid plagiarism.

Write and Cite

There are several ways that you can develop your citations and references, depending on your preference. Manually creating citations and references takes time and can be difficult work, but the NMBU Library and Writing Centre offer excellent online resources to help you with citations and references. Writing Centre staff can also help you with this process. If you want a simpler, faster process, NMBU students can freely access the software referencing program Endnote*. Endnote will create and organize your citations and references using correct reference styles. It is easy to import references and link them to a Microsoft Word document. The NMBU Library provides regular courses each semester on using Endnote, and you should register through the NMBU Library website. While Endnote is an excellent resource, if you are concerned about learning a new computer program, you may prefer to manually create your citations and references. Just remember, manually making a reference page is a lot of work, and Endnote can provide an easier way if you want to learn the program.

Endnote courses are available from the NMBU Library website

Developing your citations and references while reading also benefits your own analysis. By creating citations and references as you are reading, and developing a Write and Cite document, not only can you finish a lot of boring work at the start of your research, you can more easily identify which ideas are your own creation and what information comes from a text you have read. Having a Write and Cite document allows you to add your own ideas, questions, understanding, and analysis within the document, alongside cited and referenced information. These ideas will form the core of your analysis and will help you develop and refine your research. The best ideas are built from an ongoing process of critically reading and thinking about source material and texts. If you expect to remember your great ideas without writing them down and connecting them to important information in a Write and Cite document, you risk forgetting valuable insights.

One final benefit to creating, organizing and categorizing your ideas and information from literature is that you develop an outline for your first written draft. This Write and Cite document does the hard work of preparing and organizing the ideas you want to present in your written document. In the writing process, the majority of writing any research paper falls in the pre-writing stage. This is where you read, analyze, Write and Cite and develop an organized outline that is useful for your first draft. If you commit a lot of time and effort to developing a Write and Cite document, and organize all those ideas into a well-prepared outline, writing your first draft of a research paper or thesis is simple, easy and straightforward. A well-developed outline helps prevent writer’s block and other roadblocks to writing your final paper.

So, if you want to work smart instead of working hard, start collecting and reading literature early, and use the Write and Cite approach. Your future self will thank you.

*Zotero is also available both as a reference tool and has relevant courses through the semester