This may be more for the humanities/social science folk, not sure...

I'm looking through all my reading notes from the last few months, and was wondering how everyone else organises their notes? For my Master's I had a form that I filled in for each source, with spaces for details of methodology, results etc and any useful citations, quotations etc.

I might use that again, but I haven't really got a formal way of recording my PhD lit review notes so far, so I thought it would be interesting to see how other people do it!

Sarah

I use various fields in EndNote to summarise details about the papers/books I'm reading. So the core contents, any key points, themes etc. that I want to note. There are plenty of fields that can be used for this. Then the information is stored permanently in the computer for me, can be recalled whenever needed, and I can search across all my EndNote database for specific methodologies/sources etc. recorded in the notes that I've typed into these fields.

I haven't used EndNote yet; the uni has it, but they're thinking about changing over to RefWorks soon... But that's definitely worth considering, if our IS people can sell it to me for not-very-much. Am I right in thinking you can save your Endnote notes to the web/access them from anywhere?

I don't know if you can save EndNote databases to the web. But I have my own copy of EndNote installed on my computer at home (I bought it from the UK suppliers Adept Scientific at cheap student rates), and so never access it at the uni. I'm a student based permanently at home.

For the record the extra details I add in EndNote for my own benefit are in the Keywords, Notes, and Call Number fields.

Keywords has a list of keywords typed into it e.g. "ray tracing, planetary surface simulation" etc.

This means I can search for any of those words (say 'ray tracing') in Keywords only, or across all fields. And it will find this article and others that match the search, even if the searched-for word isn't in the title.

Then in Notes I put a very brief summary of the article/paper/book, to recall what it was about and the keypoints of relevance to me. So just a couple of sentences usually, though sometimes I write an awful lot more than that.

If I can find a detailed abstract I will put that into Abstract as well, but I don't usually have one of those, in my field. I'm more likely to make up my own notes in the Notes field.

The third field I use to add information is Call Number, where I record if I have a copy of the article e.g. a photocopy, or my own book, or a PDF file (rare for humanities!), or whatever. Basically so I can track it down again easily if I want to read it again. Also if it's in a library and I don't have a copy I might record the full library reference so I can find it easily again without rechecking the catalogue.

I don't use EndNote to automatically generate references. It doesn't work so well in my discipline, and the departmental style was hard to replicate reliably in EndNote, so in the end I just resorted to typing up footnote references manually. But EndNote is wonderful as a database of things I've read, and subsequently forgot.

This is really useful, thanks. I did try EndNote a year or two ago (think we had a session on it as part of my Master's research training) and it did terrible things to my references (I ended up having to make changes to all of them because of formatting errors) so I think I just gave up on it then. But I can see that it might be useful for keeping notes. (I quite like doing the citations myself, anyway. I know that's weird...)

I don't think it is! I find it quick and easy to do them myself, especially after I couldn't get my departmental style to work properly in EndNote.

And for the record I am a humanities student (history). I just concealed my research by using rather non-humanities examples in the earlier message ;-)