Taking thorough, organized notes is an essential part of the research writing process. Sometimes, though, ideas you wanted to include in your research notes are lost, because papers sometimes slip into the wrong file and index cards have a way of hiding in books. Even if you use your word processor to take notes - you can still spend hours sifting through files on your disk to find the right notes, or sort through the notes you've taken to review the issues to be covered in a paper, chapter, or lecture.

Citation provides you with special forms that will help you organize and keyword tag all your notes. You will be able to write a notecard at a moment's notice, since Citation is available from your word processor's Tools menu, and you will always be able to find the notes you need as you are writing. You can browse through notes on a particular issue to refresh your memory, as you are composing the outline or contents of a paper, or you can use Citation to print all your notes on a topic in Notecard format, so you can read through a hard copy (some researchers find it more useful to have printed copies of notes during the writing process). When you are actually writing your paper, you will also be able to include an Access Key in your documents for excerpts from your Citation Note records you want placed in your document.

Here's how it works, in a nutshell. First, you enter a bibliographic record for the source work:

Then you enter note records for each passage you've highlighted as pertinent to your research:

You can include comments in the note records as well, indicating the significance of the excerpt to your own research.

To learn more about using Citation to help with your research notes, browse through our new Citation Handbook. This brief online guide walks you through the "Citation ABCs" - a guide for using Citation to keep careful records of source works and organize research notes of excerpts and comments on those source works.