how to organize research articles

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15 Best Free Web Tools to Organize Your Research

How to stay organized when researching and writing papers

Emporia State University
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Organizing research is important not only for your own sanity, but because when it comes time to unfold the data and put it to use, you want the process to go as smoothly as possible. This is where research organizers come in.

There are lots of free web-based organizers that you can use for any purpose. Maybe you're collecting interviews for a news story, digging up newspaper archives for a history project, or writing a research paper over a science topic. Research organizers are also helpful for staying productive and preparing for tests.

Regardless of the topic, when you have multiple sources of information and lots to comb through later, optimizing your workflow with a dedicated organizer is essential.

Patrick Tomasso / Unsplash

Many of these tools provide unique features, so you might decide to use multiple resources simultaneously in whatever way suits your particular needs.

Research and Study

You need a place to gather the information you're finding. To avoid a cluttered space when collecting and organizing data, you can use a tool dedicated to research.

Pocket : Save web pages to your online account to reference them again later. It's much tidier than bookmarks, and it can all be retrieved from the web or the Pocket mobile app .
Mendeley : Organize papers and references, and generate citations and bibliographies.
Quizlet : Learn vocabulary with these free online flashcards .
Wikipedia : Find information on millions of different topics.
Quora : This is a question and answer website where you can ask the community for help with any question.
SparkNotes : Free online study guides on a wide variety of subjects, anything from famous literary works of the past century to the present day.
Zotero : Collect, manage, and cite your research sources. Lets you organize data into collections and search through them by adding tags to every source. This is a computer program, but there's a browser extension that helps you send data to it.
Google Scholar : A simple way to search for scholarly literature on any subject.
Diigo : Collect, share, and interact with information from anywhere on the web. It's all accessible through the browser extension and saved to your online account.
GoConqr : Create flashcards, mind maps, notes, quizzes, and more to bridge the gap between your research and studying.

Writing Tools

Writing is the other half of a research paper, so you need somewhere useful to go to jot down notes, record information you might use in the final paper, create drafts, track sources, and finalize the paper.

Web Page Sticky Notes : For Chrome users, this tool lets you place sticky notes on any web page as you do your research. There are tons of settings you can customize, they're backed up to your Google Drive account, and they're visible not only on each page you created them on but also on a single page from the extension's settings.
Google Docs or Word Online : These are online word processors where you can write the entire research paper, organize lists, paste URLs, store off-hand notes, and more.
Google Keep : This note-taking app and website catalogs notes within labels that make sense for your research. Access them from the web on any computer or from your mobile device. It supports collaborations, custom colors, images, drawings, and reminders.
Yahoo Notepad : If you use Yahoo Mail , the notes area of your account is a great place to store text-based snippets for easy recall when you need them.
Notion : Workflows, notes, and more, in a space where you can collaborate with others.

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How to Organize Research Papers: A Cheat Sheet for Graduate Students

August 8, 2022
PRODUCTIVITY

It is crucial to organize research papers so that the literature survey process goes smoothly once the data has been gathered and analyzed. This is where a research organizer is useful.

It may be helpful to plan the structure of your writing before you start writing: organizing your ideas before you begin to write will help you decide what to write and how to write it.

It can be challenging to keep your research organized when writing an essay. The truth is, there’s no one “ best ” way to get organized, and there’s no one answer. Whatever system you choose, make sure it works for your learning style and writing habits.

As a graduate student, learning how to organize research papers is therefore essential.

This blog post will cover the basics of organizing research papers and the tools I use to organize my research.

Before you start

The importance of organizing research papers.

No matter how good your paper management system is, even if you keep all your literature in places that are easy to find, you won’t be able to “create” anything unless you haven’t thought about organizing what you get from them.

The goal of the research is to publish your own work to society for the benefit of everyone in the field and, ultimately, humanity.

In your final year of your PhD, when you see all the papers you’ve stored over the years, imagine the frustration you might experience if you hadn’t gathered the information from those papers in a way that allows you to “create” something with i.

This is why organizing research papers is important when starting your research.

Research with your final product in mind

It is very important to have a clear idea of what your research’s outcome will be to collect the information you really need.

If you don’t yet have all your information, consider what “subheadings” or chunks you could write about.

Write a concept map if you need help identifying your topic chunks. As an introduction to concept mapping, it involves writing down a term or idea and then brainstorming other ideas within it.

To gather information like this, you can use a mind map.

When you find useful information.

Come up with a proper file management system.

Sort your literature with a file management system. There’s no need to come up with a very narrow filing system at this point. Try sorting your research into broader areas of your field. When you’re more familiar with your own research, you’ll be able to narrow down your filing system.

Start with these methods:

Don’t waste your time on stuff that’s interesting but not useful :

In your own research, what’s the most important part of a particular paper? You won’t have to pay attention to other sections of that paper if you find that section first.

What is the argument behind your research? Make notes on that information, and then throw everything else away.

Create multiple folders :

Create a file containing related topics if you’re using a computer. Bind the related articles together if you like to print out papers. In other words, keep related things together!

Color code your research papers:

To organize notes and articles, assign different colors to each sub-topic and use highlighters, tabs, or font colors.

Organize your literature chronologically:

Even in a short period of time, you might have missed overarching themes or arguments if you hadn’t read them previously. It’s best to organize your research papers chronologically.

If you want to do all this at once, I suggest using a reference manager like Zotero or Mendeley (more on reference managers later).

File renaming

Make sure you rename your files on your computer according to your own renaming strategy. Taking this step will save you time and confusion as your research progresses.

My usual way of naming a pdf is to use the first author’s last name, followed by the first ten letters of the title and then the year of publication. As an example, For the paper “ Temperature-Dependent Infrared Refractive Index of Polymers from a Calibrated Attenuated Total Reflection Infrared Measurement ” by Azam et al., I renamed the file as “ Azam_Temperature-Dependent_2022.pdf “.

One thing to notice is that I don’t do this manually for all the papers I download. That wouldn’t be as productive, and I’d probably give up after some time renaming every single file. In my reference manager of choice (Zotero), I use a plugin called Zotfile to do this automatically. Zotfile automatically renames files and puts them in the folder I specify every time I add a new paper.

Organizing your research articles by the last names of the lead authors will simplify your citation and referencing process since you have to cite the names of the researchers everywhere. The articles will also be easier to find because they’ll be lined up alphabetically by any researcher’s name you can remember.

Use keywords wisely

Keywords are the most important part of sorting. It’s easy to forget to move a paper to a specific file sometimes because you’re overwhelmed. But you can tag a paper in seconds.

When organizing research papers, don’t forget to develop a better keyword system, especially if you use a reference manager.

My reference manager, for instance, allows me to view all the keywords I have assigned in the main window, making life much easier.

Create annotations

When reading literature, it is very important to create your own annotations, as discussed in the blog post series, “ Bulletproof literature management system “.

This is the fourth post of the four-part blog series: The Bulletproof Literature Management System . Follow the links below to read the other posts in the series:

How to How to find Research Papers
How to Manage Research Papers
How to Read Research Papers
How to Organize Research Papers (You are here)

The best thing to do is to summarize each section of the article/book you are reading that interests you. Don’t forget to include the key parts/arguments/quotes you liked.

Write your own notes

If you decide to read the whole paper, make sure you write your own summary. The reason is that 95% of the things you read will be forgotten after a certain period of time. When that happens, you may have to read the paper all over again if you do not take notes and write your own summary.

By writing your own summary, you will likely memorize the basic idea of the research paper. Additionally, you can link to other similar papers. In this way, you can benefit from the knowledge you gain from reading research papers.

After reading a paper, make sure to ask these questions:

Why is this source helpful for your essay?
How does it support your thesis?

Keep all the relevant information in one place so that you can refer to it when writing your own thesis.

Use an app like Obsidian to link your thinking if you keep all your files on a computer, making things much easier.

When you are ready to write

Write out of order .

Once you have all the necessary information, you can use your filing system, PDF renaming strategy, and keywords to draw the annotations and notes you need.

Now that you’re all set to write, don’t worry about writing the perfect paper or thesis right away.

Your introduction doesn’t have to come first.

If necessary, you can change your introduction at the end – sometimes, your essay takes a different direction. Nothing to worry about!

Write down ideas as they come to you

As you complete your research, many full-sentence paragraphs will come to your mind. Do not forget to write these down – even in your notes or annotations. Keep a notebook or your phone handy to jot down ideas as you get them. You can then find the information and revise it again to develop a better version if you’re working on the same project for a few days/weeks.

My toolbox to organize research papers

Stick with the free stuff.

Trying to be a productive grease monkey, I’ve tried many apps over the years. Here’s what I learned.

The simplest solution is always the best solution (the Occam razor principle always wins!).
The free solution is always the best (because they have the best communities to help you out and are more customizable).

As someone who used to believe that if something is free, you’re the product, I’ve learned that statement isn’t always true.

Ironically, open-source software tends to get better support than proprietary stuff. It’s better to have millions of enthusiasts working for free than ten paid support staff.

There are a lot of reviews out there, and EndNote usually comes out at the bottom. I used EndNote for five years – it worked fine, but other software improved faster. Now I use Zotero, which I like for its web integration.

Obsidian, my note-taking app of choice, is also free software. Furthermore, you own your files; also, you’ve got a thriving community.

There are a lot of similarities between the software as they adopt each other’s features, and it’s just a matter of preference.

In any researcher’s toolbox, a reference manager is an essential tool.

A reference manager has two important features: the ability to get citation data into the app and the ability to use the citation data in your writing tool.

It should also work on Windows just as well as macOS or Linux, be free, and allow you to manage PDFs of papers or scanned book chapters.

Zotero , in my opinion, gives you all of this and more.

Zotero is one of the best free reference managers for collecting citation data. It includes a browser plugin that lets you save citation information on Google Scholar, journal pages, YouTube, Amazon, and many other websites, including news articles. It automatically downloads a PDF of the associated source when available for news articles, which is very convenient.

One of the things I really like about Zotero is that it has so many third-party plugins that we have almost complete control over how we use it.

With Zotero 6, you can also read and annotate PDFs, which is perfect for your needs.

My Research paper organizing workflow in Zotero :

Get References and PDF papers into Zotero : I use Zotero’s web plugin to import PDFs directly
Filing and sorting : I save files from the web plugin into the file system I already have created in Zotero and assign tags as I do so.
File renaming : When I save the file, the Zotero plugin (Zotfile) automatically renames it and stores the pdf where I specified.
Extracting Annotations and taking notes : I use Zotero in the build pdf reader to take notes and annotate, and then I extract them and link them in Obsidian (next section).

You need to keep your notes organized and accessible once you’ve established a strong reading habit. For this purpose, I use Obsidian . I use Obsidian to manage everything related to my graduate studies, including notes, projects, and tasks.

Using a plugin called mdnotes , Obsidian can also sync up with my reference manager of choice, Zotero. It automatically adds new papers to my Obsidian database whenever I add them to Zotero.

Obsidian may have a steep learning curve for those unfamiliar with bi-directional linking , but using similar software will make things much easier. Thus, you may be better off investing your time in devising a note-taking system that works for you.

You can also use a spreadsheet! Make a table with all the papers you read, whatever tool you choose. Include the paper’s status (e.g., whether you’ve read it) and any relevant projects. This is what mine looks like.

I keep all my notes on an associated page for each paper. In a spreadsheet, you can write your notes directly in the row or link to a Google document for each row. Zotero, for example, allows you to attach notes directly to reference files.

While it might seem like a lot of work, keeping a database of papers you’ve read helps with literature reviews, funding applications, and more. I can filter by keywords or relevant projects, so I don’t have to re-read anything.

The habit of reading papers and learning how to organize research papers has made me a better researcher. It takes me much less time to read now, and I use it to improve my experiments. I used this system a lot when putting together my PhD fellowship application and my candidacy exam. In the future, I will thank myself for having the foresight to take these steps today before starting to write my dissertation.

I am curious to know how others organize their research papers since there is no “ right ” way. Feel free to comment, and we will update the post with any interesting responses!

Images courtesy : Classified vector created by storyset – www.freepik.com

Aruna Kumarasiri

Founder at Proactive Grad, Materials Engineer, Researcher, and turned author. In 2019, he started his professional carrier as a materials engineer with the continuation of his research studies. His exposure to both academic and industrial worlds has provided many opportunities for him to give back to young professionals.

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How to Effectively Organize your Research Articles on your System

Importance of Organizing Research Articles

Brief overview of the article, create a folder structure, use file naming conventions, utilize metadata and tags, backup and sync files, use a reference management software, regularly review and update folder structure, keep related articles together, adding meta description, introduction.

In today’s fast-paced environment, research and knowledge are constantly produced at an exponential rate. When there is so much information to keep track of, the organization may be a challenge. A system for efficiently managing, storing, and retrieving academics’ and researchers’ papers and research materials is essential. By doing this, you not only save time but also ensure that you never lose track of important information and discoveries.

This article will discuss how to organize your research papers on a computer, providing you with step-by-step instructions and suggestions to keep everything organized and easy to discover.

This article’s information and suggestions will give you the methods and tools you need to efficiently manage and arrange your research articles, whether you’re a student, academician or researcher. So let’s get going.

The organization of the research articles is a critical phase in the study procedure. A well-organized research library guarantees that you never overlook important findings or miss important information in addition to saving you time and effort. Research articles are the cornerstones of your career and the source of original ideas and discoveries. When your articles are arranged correctly, you can quickly and easily retrieve the information you need, utilize it as a source in your writing, and expand on it in future pieces.

In this post, you will learn in detail how to arrange your research articles on your desktop. You will learn how to back up and sync your files, use metadata and tags, use file naming conventions, and organize your files into folders. We’ll also cover how to use reference management software and regularly update your folder structure as well as how to keep your research papers organized. By the time you finish reading this article, you will be familiar with all the techniques and resources needed to effectively organize and manage your research papers.

Steps to Organize Research Articles on Desktop

Main Folder for All Research Articles : Start by creating a main folder that will serve as the home for all your research articles. You can name this folder something like “Research Articles” or “My Library.” This will provide a centralized location for all of your research materials, making it easy to find what you need.
Sub-Folders for Each Topic or Project : Next, create sub-folders within the main folder to categorize your research articles by topic or project. For example, you might have sub-folders for “My Papers” as “2010, 2011 etc ” or “Author1, Author2.” This helps to keep related articles together and makes it easier to find what you’re looking for.
Identical and Detailed File Names : Utilizing a standardized and informative file naming strategy is crucial when archiving your research publications. Use a format like “Author Last Name – Article Title,” for instance. This helps to guarantee that the file names are distinctive and descriptive while also making it simpler to find the items you need quickly.
Make use of keywords in file names : It’s beneficial to add pertinent keywords to the file names in addition to using descriptive file names. You might include “Machine Learning” in the file name if the article is on machine learning, for instance. This makes it simpler to look up and locate particular articles based on the subjects they cover.

Add Relevant Information to the File Properties : Adding relevant information to the file properties, such as the author, date, and publication information, can help you quickly identify and categorize your research articles. This information is often included in the metadata of the file, which can be accessed by right-clicking on the file and selecting “Properties.”
Use Tags to Categorize and Search for Articles Easily : Using tags to categorize and search for your research articles can also be a helpful tool. For example, you might add tags like “Computer Science,” “Machine Learning,” or “History.” This allows you to quickly find articles based on the topics they cover, even if they are stored in different folders.
Importance of Backup : Backing up your research articles is an important step in the process of organizing your files. This ensures that you will not lose your research materials in the event of a technical issue, such as a computer crash or data loss.
Options for Backup and Syncing (e.g. Cloud Storage) : There are several options for backing up and syncing your research articles, including cloud storage services like Google Drive or Dropbox. These services allow you to store your files in the cloud and access them from anywhere, providing an extra layer of protection and ensuring that your research materials are always safe and accessible.

Tips for Keeping Research Articles Organized

Reference management software is a tool that can help you manage and organize your research articles and citations. These programs provide a centralized location for your research materials, making it easy to store, manage, and retrieve your articles and information.
One popular example of reference management software is Mendeley . Mendeley allows you to store and organize your research articles, add notes and annotations, and create bibliographies in a variety of formats. It also includes a desktop application and a web-based interface, allowing you to access your research materials from anywhere.

You can visit my article on How Mendeley Reference Management Software makes Researcher’s Life Easy? . The article will help you in organizing your research articles in an optimal way.

It’s important to regularly review and update your folder structure to ensure that your research articles are properly organized and easily accessible. This will help you identify any areas where your folder structure may be lacking, or where additional sub-folders may be needed.
A good practice is to review your folder structure at least once a quarter, or as needed. During this review, you can assess your folder structure and make any necessary updates to ensure that your research articles are properly categorized and organized. You may also want to consider regularly reviewing the metadata and tags associated with your files to ensure that they are up-to-date and relevant.
Project-wise : Let’s say you are working on a research project about the impacts of climate change on coastal ecosystems. To organize your papers project-wise, you could create a folder for your climate change project and sub-folders for each aspect of the research, such as “Sea Level Rise,” “Ocean Acidification,” and “Coastal Ecosystems.” Within each sub-folder, you can store your research articles, notes, and any other related materials.
Methodology-wise : If you are interested in exploring different research methods, you could create a folder for each method, such as “Quantitative Research,” “Qualitative Research,” and “Mixed Methods.” Within each folder, you can store papers that discuss or use that particular method, making it easy to compare and contrast the different approaches.
Keyword-wise : If you are exploring a specific topic, such as “Artificial Intelligence,” you could create a folder with that keyword and store all of the articles, papers, and other materials related to the topic. This method allows you to quickly find all of the information you have related to a particular topic, making it easier to stay informed and up-to-date with the latest developments in the field.
Format-wise : If you have a mix of different types of research materials, such as articles, conference papers, and book chapters, you could create folders for each format and store your materials accordingly. For example, you could create folders for “Articles,” “Conference Papers,” and “Book Chapters,” and store your materials in the appropriate folder. This method allows you to quickly find the type of information you need, regardless of the format in which it is stored.

These are just a few examples of the different methods for organizing research papers. The best method for you will depend on your research needs and preferences, and you may find it useful to use a combination of methods, depending on your research needs.

Adding meta descriptions to your folders can help you quickly understand what each folder contains and why it is important. Here’s how to add a meta description to a folder:

Create a text file or Excel file: In the same folder, you want to add a description, create a new text file or Excel file. You can name this file “Description” or “Meta Description.”
Write a brief summary: In the text/Excel file, write a brief summary of the contents of the folder and its purpose. For example, if you have a folder for “Articles” you might write “This folder contains all of my research articles on the topic of X.”
Save the file: Save the text/Excel file with the description in the same folder that you want to describe.

Note: The process for adding a meta description will vary depending on the operating system and file management software you are using. However, the general principle of creating a text/Excel file with a brief summary remains the same.

By adding meta descriptions to your folders, you can quickly understand the contents of each folder and why it is important. This can save you time and help you stay organized as you work on your research.

To remain effective and productive as a researcher, it’s crucial to organize research articles on your desktop computer. You may quickly discover the information you need by using one of the various organizing techniques covered in this article, whether your search is project-, methodology-, keyword-, or format-based. Additionally, by including meta descriptions in your folders, you can save time and stay organized by understanding quickly what each folder includes and why it’s important. Organizing your research articles is crucial for staying on top of your work and making the most of your research efforts, whether you are a student, academic, or professional.

By taking the time to organize your research articles, you can streamline your workflow, stay informed about the latest developments in your field, and ultimately, make the most of your research efforts.

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Organizing your research: A scientist’s tips for journalists

Maya Gosztyla, a Ph.D. candidate in the Biomedical Sciences Graduate Program at the University of California San Diego, provides an overview of literature mapping tools, RSS feeds, research management software and databases to help journalists organize their research.

Republish this article

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

by Naseem S. Miller, The Journalist's Resource March 21, 2023

This <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org/home/organizing-your-research/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org">The Journalist's Resource</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/cropped-jr-favicon-150x150.png" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

Journalists collect a lot of stuff while reporting, especially for big stories and projects: interviews, documents, research papers, articles. It can be overwhelming at times.

Academics too must collect a large number of documents. They use a variety of tools to organize their work, some of which journalists can also use to organize materials.

During a panel at the 2023 Association of Health Care Journalists conference in St. Louis, Missouri, Maya Gosztyla , a Ph.D. candidate in the Biomedical Sciences Graduate Program at the University of California San Diego, shared her organizational approach as a scientist, which journalists can easily adopt. She’s the authors of 2022 Nature career columns, “ How to Find, Read and Organize Papers ” and “ How to Manage Your Time as a Researcher .”

Below is a list of tips and tools that Gosztyla shared during the panel.

1. Find related research with literature mapping tools.

When journalists report on a new study, it’s important to consider where that study fits into the larger body of research.

Pubmed and Google Scholar are go-to research platforms to find academic research . But they’re not the most efficient tools for finding research related to a specific academic study.

A better approach is using literature mapping tools , which show the connection between research papers.

“Imagine papers like nodes in a network,” Gosztyla said. “Each paper will cite other papers, and what you can do is make a giant map of all the papers in a specific subject area. And then you can see the hubs — what are the papers that everyone cites that you should probably read.”

Some of the popular literature mapping tools, which offer free versions, include ResearchRabbit, Inciteful, Connected Papers and Litmaps .

2. Stay on top of current research with RSS feeds.

Many journalists, especially those who write about academic research, subscribe to journal email lists. But that may not be the best option for organizing research.

“It kind of overwhelms your inbox after a while,” said Gosztyla.

Another common method is setting up keyword email alerts. Both Pubmed and Google Scholar let you set up email alerts for specific keywords. But that too can crowd your email inbox.

Gosztyla’s solution is using an RSS feed reader .

RSS stands for “really simple syndication.” An RSS feed reader — or RSS feed aggregator — gets all the new articles or studies published on a website and brings them together in a timeline that you can quickly scroll through.

Many websites have RSS feeds. Once you have a link for the RSS feed, you can then add it to a free or paid RSS feed reader.

Here’s a good explainer by Lifewire on how to find RSS feeds and add it to a reader.

Gosztyla spends a few minutes every morning scrolling through her RSS feed reader — her favorite is Feedly — to check for new published research in her field.

This August 2022 article from Wired lists some of the more popular RSS feed readers.

3. Use research management software to file your research.

10 things we wish we’d known earlier about research: Tips from The Journalist’s Resource

There are several free online tools that can help you store what you find during your research instead having dozens of open tabs on your browser.

A popular tool developed by and for journalists is DocumentCloud , where you can upload documents, search the text, annotate, extract data , redact and edit.

Another option, popular among academics, is Zotero . It’s a free, open-source reference management tool and can store and organize your research material, including PDF files.

You can use Zotero in a browser, but for a more powerful experience, download it and install the Zotero plugin for your browser. When you come across a study or article that you want to save, click the plugin. It will save the item to your desired Zotero folder. You can create many folders and subfolders, and also share folders. You can also highlight and annotate PDFs.

“If you’re not using a reference manager, I highly, highly recommend them,” said Gosztyla.

You can integrate Zotero to several apps and programs, including, Word, Google Docs and literature mapping tools like ResearchRabbit.

Some of the alternatives to Zotero include, Mendeley , EndNote , RefWorks and Sciwheel .

4. Routinely read your research pile.

To stay on top of what you’re collecting, Gosztyla offered this advice:

Block out a time each week, like two hours on Fridays, to read. If you have a big pile, maybe devote a couple of days to reading.

And decide how you’re going to spend that reading time: are you going to devote it to do a deep dive, or just scan what you’ve collected, take notes and decide what to keep and what to toss.

“Maybe it’s your routine that every week you buy yourself a nice cup of coffee. You go to a certain cafe and you just read,” Gosztyla said. “So find a routine that you really look forward to and it’s something you want to do.”

5. Don’t forget to take notes while reading documents .

“Don’t ever read without highlighting or taking notes,” Gosztyla said. “Otherwise, you will forget it. I guarantee it.”

Write a small note, a blurb, on the material you read to remind you of its main takeaways and where it fits into your project. Do you need to email or interview the author with follow-up questions? Or read the authors’ previous work? Make a note of those.

In the next step, you’ll learn about organizing those notes.

6. You have collected. You have read. Now organize your work in a database.

Research management software can help you organize your documents, but it’s helpful to create a database of what you’ve collected, your tasks for each item, and maybe a summary and key points. You can use Google Sheets of Microsoft Excel to create your list.

If you want something other than a classic spreadsheet, you can try web applications like Notion.

Notion is a powerful program, which Gosztyla described as a “multi-use database tool.” Notion describes itself as an all-in-one workspace. You can use it to organize your research, manage projects and tasks, note-taking and even your daily journals. You can also integrate Notion with many other apps and tools.

It has a steep learning curve. Give yourself time to learn to use it before integrating it into your workflow. Notion has tutorials on YouTube and a wiki page . Gosztyla recommended Thomas Frank Explains YouTube tutorials. Frank is an author, YouTuber, and Notion expert.

Some alternatives to Notion include Airtable , Trello and Coda .

7. Go one step further with automation tools.

If you want to go a step further in your Notion journey, you can link a Zotero folder to Notion with a tool called Notero . Every time you add an item to your Zotero folder, it populates your Notion database.

Notion has many templates you can choose from. Or you can use Gosztyla’s template .

You can automate and integrate other apps too, to create a better workflow for your work. Some of the popular options are IFTTT — Short for If This Then That — which integrates apps, devices and services to create automated workflows, and Zapier , which connects web applications and allows users to create automated workflows.

Keep in mind, you don’t have to use all the tools listed above.

“Take the pieces that work for you and apply them to your life,” advised Gosztyla.

If you want to share a tool that’s helped you organize your research, you can reach me at [email protected] . You can reach Gosztyla on Twitter @MayaGosztyla .

About The Author

Naseem S. Miller

How to Search and Organize Research Articles

by Tiffany Yue Zhang
November 01, 2021

Quick Summary

Organizing research articles using a reference manager and other strategies will make life as a graduate student much easier.

As PhD students, reading is part of our life. There are so many new papers coming out every day, so many research blogs to follow, so many books to read. But, how would you find them and organize them? Certainly, I’ve seen people downloading everything to their desktop and piling up 100 pdfs with no labeling or grouping. To be honest, that was me at one point. When you start to write a report or research paper, it can become a nightmare to organize the reference list. If you are first year graduate student doing research, or if you are just looking for a method to organize your scientific literature, this blog can hopefully help.

Finding Articles

The best resources for starting to build your reading list are your advisor and lab mates. This is definitely the fastest way to gain background on your research area. Simply ask around the lab about key articles in the research field. The downside of this method is that the pool of articles is limited by what’s already known by your advisor or lab mates. Starting by reading a review paper in your field, then finding and reading the most relevant references listed for the review, is also a good method.

Searching by key words is another common way to find scientific literature. I use Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Scopus, mostly. Searches can be done by entering the key words, subject area, document type (e. g. review, articles), and sort by relevance. Start to read from the most cited papers in your field. If you are interested in a specific researcher’s publications, you can follow them on Google Scholar and you’ll get notified when they publish new articles. Lens.org is another good resource for searching, analyzing and managing patent and scholarly data.

Subscribing to RSS feeds is another good way to keep up with recent research. There are a variety of apps that can send notifications when new research papers of interest are coming out, such as Researcher, Feedly and Academia. Pick your favorite topics or journals to follow and get your daily feeds about research topics. You can even track when a paper is cited. These tools are good for scientific literature, but you can also use them for your hobbies, your favorite magazines, etc.

Following blogs can be helpful, as well. As a chemistry student, I follow some of the ACS (American Chemical Society), RSC (The Royal Society of Chemistry) blogs, as well as blogs written by researchers and professors. If you are looking for something interesting to read, follow Retraction Watch. There, you’ll find the research articles that are retracted for fraud, ethical violations, and many other reasons. Some stories can be quite interesting.

Listening to podcasts can be a good way to broaden your knowledge. Usually, the content in podcasts is less technical and you can learn some basics for topics that you are not familiar with.

Organizing Research Papers

Different people find different ways to organize research articles. Some prefer to print everything out and put them in binders, some prefer to read the digital versions and sort them in folders. Personally, I like to read on a computer screen and sort research papers by project. I usually keep important references in a reference manager. For papers that I want to go over multiple times, I usually print them out and read them carefully. It’s easier to take notes with a printed version and, for some reason, it seems like I can memorize the content longer when I read the printed paper. The main drawback in using hard copies is that it can be difficult to find a specific paper when you have a large pile. With digital versions, it’s much easier to locate specific research articles by keywords.

There are many digital reference managers. This type of software tool can allow you to keep research articles in different folders for each research project. Within the reference manager, you can also take notes, sort by author, year, or topic. Most reference managers also help with searching for research articles. When you write a report or publication, reference managers allow for import of references from these databases directly into Microsoft Word, which is very convenient. Here are three of the most commonly used reference managers: EndNote, Mendeley (Figure 1) and Zotero. All of them can sync between devices and be shared between different people. EndNote is not free, but it is very powerful. It supports many unusual or complex citation formats. Some versions of Mendeley are free. It’s good at dealing with pdfs files and can extract citations from pdfs, as well as searching from pdfs. Zotero is also free and allows for saving snapshots of web pages and annotating them in your library, which is good for web-based publications.

When I read a paper, I usually ask myself the following questions: 1) what’s the purpose of reading this article?; 2) how is the article important or relevant to my work?; and, 3) what’s the take home message?. If the paper is important, I then write down the conclusions and methods. Taking notes makes reading more efficient ( Figure 2). Notion is a good application to keep track of reading notes and allows for creation of lists of papers for different topics. You can also assign properties to each paper and tag papers with keywords. Notion also supports markdown which makes your notes clean and easy to read. When I read a research article, I usually start with the title and abstract and try to figure out the big picture conclusions or contributions to the research field. Then, I skim through the figures and the figure captions to get an idea of the key points. If a figure is important, I keep it in my notes. I usually skip the introduction at first if I’m familiar with the author or the research field, instead jumping directly into the results and conclusion sections. From there, I’ll decide if I want to read the paper in detail or not. Different people have different ways of reading papers; find the one that works for you.

I hope you find these methods helpful for finding and organizing research articles and happy reading!

Marcus, Adam, and Ivan Oransky. Retraction Watch , Oct 24 2021, https://retractionwatch.com/.

“Which Reference Manager? Comparision of Endnote, Medeley and Zotero.” Library Guides , Mar 2 2021, https://aut.ac.nz.libguides.com/managingreferences.

“How to (Seriously) Read a Scientific Paper.” Science , Mar 21 2016, https://www.science.org/content/article/how-seriously-read-scientific-paper.

Primary Category

Secondary categories.

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Work hack: How to organize your research literature – and make it sharable

A must-have strategy for fieldwork.

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17 July 2020

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The amount of literature researchers are expected to stay abreast of can be overwhelming so it’s vital to have a system that allows documents and images to be stored, recalled, and easily shared.

This is particularly true for researchers who conduct fieldwork and need to access information on the fly.

For PhD candidate, Yi-Kai Tea, a taxonomist and systematist at the University of Sydney in Australia, setting up a cloud-based system early on in his career was one of the most important things he did.

“The more you read, the more familiar you are with the field and the groups you’re working with,” says Tea. “I keep my literature very well sorted because it’s so important.”

Tea specializes in describing and naming new species of coral reef fishes. He’s particularly interested in fairy wrasses, and was responsible for naming a new species last year , Cirrhilabrus wakanda , inspired by the Marvel film Black Panther .

“It’s hard to do this kind of work by yourself because of the sheer number of species out there. I work collaboratively with a lot of fish enthusiasts, scientists, and collectors who go out in the field and send information to me,” says Tea.

How do your Google Drive and Dropbox systems work?

I have an account where I put in everything that’s related to fairy wrasses: every single species description that’s been written about them since the 1800s, every single colour photo, distribution map, vectors, diagrams - everything you can think of that might be relevant to this group. I maintain a well-curated folder that can be accessed online.

I’ve also have decked it out so I can access the most important files offline.

I share it with any collaborators that I’m working with now or might be working with in the future, so they can access it in the field. It helps with my research as well, to have all these papers at my disposal. It’s my own personal library.

How did you set it up?

I’ve been filling it in over a number of years. Some of the literature is hard to find – a lot of the original descriptions are in manuscript form, and some of them haven’t been published, so to get these, you need to go to the museums and libraries and photocopy them, scan them, make pdfs, and upload them.

It took a while to track down all the literature and species descriptions, but once you have it, you have it forever and can keep curating it. I save every PDF that I download. I keep it in a folder, name it, and order it by author and by date. I follow this system quite religiously.

What web resources do you use to source your literature?

Some of the old manuscripts I need to access are archived in online repositories such as the Biodiversity Heritage Library , so having this link saved in my tabs is a really useful tool.

Other important web resources I use a lot are Eshmeyer's Catalogue of Fishes hosted by the California Academy of Sciences, and iNaturalist , a catalogue that keeps a pretty up-to-date record of all species, complete with references.

iNaturalist is a fantastic resource to search for in-situ photos of whatever taxon you might be interested in. I often seek out photographers from iNaturalist who are willing to contribute photos I may need for my research. Many of them are very willing, or may already have photos up that are free for use.

How do you organize your own data in the field?

I have ready-made excel spreadsheets with standardized columns containing anatomical features that I need to measure. I then modify it slightly to accommodate whatever taxon I happen to be working on.

I do same for manuscripts – I have a basic skeleton written for diagnoses and descriptions, with placeholder symbols where values would eventually go.

A lot of taxonomic papers follow a consistent and ‘tried and tested’ formula, so this works very well, especially for fairy wrasses, where most of the methodology and description follow previous papers that I've published.

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Law Library

Researching for a Scholarly Article or Seminar (SAW) Paper

Organizing your research.

Introduction and Things to Know

Research Plans and Logs

Citation and file management tools.

Selecting a Topic
Preemption Checking
Searching for Scholarly Legal Articles
Searching for Non-Legal Articles
Searching for Forthcoming Articles
Searching for Books
Searching for Statistics
Searching for Primary Sources
Citing Sources
Books on Legal Writing
Books on Dissertation Writing (for SJDs and JD/PhDs)
Publishing Your Article
Getting Help

Good research involves running multiple searches of multiple databases and sorting through large numbers of books and articles.

To avoid unnecessarily retracing your steps, figure out a system in advance to track what databases you've checked and what searches you've run and to record and organize useful sources.

Each researcher has their own tools and methods. This page provides some popular methods and tools, so you can find what works for you!

Research Plan and Log Templates Five (5) template options designed to help keep you organized and on track. Choose one or adapt and modify them to fit your project.

Several tools allow you to save and organize citations and associated files. Often, you can save articles citations and text directly from databases' search results pages, simply by clicking a button and checking the articles that you want. (However, note that citations will usually require some manual clean up and citation managers typically do not work with Lexis and Westlaw.)

Here are some starting points for exploring citation and file management tools:

UCLA Library Guide to EndNote Guide created by the UCLA library, providing an overview of the popular EndNote citation and file management tool.
UCLA Library Guide to Zotero Guide created by the UCLA library, providing an overview of the popular Zotero citation and file management tool.
Oregon State University Library Guide to Zotero Guide created by the Oregon State University library, providing detailed informaiton on the popular Zotero citation and file management tool, including a step-by-step walkthrough of how to drag PDFs you've already saved on your computer into Zotero .
Zotero Plugins Advanced plugins for Zotero that allow you to import already organized folders of PDFs into Zotero, look up how many times articles you saved to Zotero have been cited, convert images scans to OCR text, and more.
Oregon State University Library Guide to Mendeley Guide created by the Oregon State University library, providing detailed information on the popular Mendeley citation and file management tool
<< Previous: Introduction and Things to Know
Next: Selecting a Topic >>
Last Updated: Jun 10, 2024 5:51 PM
URL: https://libguides.law.ucla.edu/papers

Ask a Librarian

Literature Reviews

1. What is a Literature Review?
Developing a Research Question
Types of Reviews
EagleSearch and Research Databases
Search Tips and Shortcuts
4. Organizing Your Research
5. Writing a Literature Review
Additional Resources

Documenting Research

Synthesis Matrix You can download and use this synthesis matrix to help organize your research.
Summary Record You can download and use this summary record to organize important elements of your research. This spreadsheet will be very useful once you begin writing your literature review.

Adapted from: Management & Business Research (2018). Sage Publications.

Organizing Your Research

As you progress in your research and start to collect relevant books, articles, and more, you may want to use a citation and research management tool to help you organize your research. The Hunt Library provides access to an institutional subscription to RefWorks, but there are also other free tools available.

See the below research guides for more information.

RefWorks by David Woolard Last Updated Sep 16, 2024 984 views this year
Citation & Research Management Tools by Margarita Velázquez-Mercado Last Updated Jul 31, 2024 824 views this year

Synthesis Matrix

Once you have searched and analyzed the literature, you can now synthesize what you have learned and how it fits into your research project. You will then be ready to write your literature review.

One strategy is to create a synthesis matrix. A synthesis matrix helps you organize the main points of each book, article, or other information resource you use. It allows you to see how the sources relate to each other and helps guide your writing.

2:06 Tutorial about creating a synthesis matrix

<< Previous: Search Tips and Shortcuts
Next: 5. Writing a Literature Review >>
Last Updated: Oct 25, 2023 10:38 AM
URL: https://guides.erau.edu/lit-review

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How to Organize Research: Notes, PDF Files, & Documents

Topics covered ✅.

How to organize research papers and PDF files
How to organize research projects
Organizing research notes
Organizing research notes software
Organizing research tools
Research organizer template
How to organize research material

If you are a busy college student, creator, or blogger your life can get really cluttered. But the messiness in our lives can extend much farther than just a dorm room or office. As active researchers, we can often struggle to organize research in the form of copious amounts of articles, journals, academic writings, thesis, rough drafts, etc.

It gets pretty exhausting.

But where do you even begin?

What's the best way to organize research?

We believe we have created the best recipe for organizing your research and you will never go back to your old ways.

1. Note-taking and Mind mapping – How to Hack Your Mind

First, start by organizing your notes into categories. You can do this on a sticky note or on a mind map.

Even though you may feel like a middle school kid using colorful sticky paper, sticky notes are proven to be one of the most effective ways to organize research.

You'll want to do some research before you begin writing.

Use sticky notes to organize the information you find, and write down any thoughts or ideas that come up as you read or listen.

Also, sticky notes are great if you want to jot down quick notes during a lecture or discussion with friends about the topic at hand.

You can write down important points and make connections between them on sticky notes.

An option similar to this is creating a mind map.

If you are a very visual learner, this style of research may appeal to you because you can visually see where you will be taking this research into categories and subcategories.

Plus it’s fun making them!

2. The Hard Part – Research & Writing

You should be familiar with the different types of sources that you can use when writing a research paper.

5 Examples of Sources

Here are a few examples of sources:

Primary sources (original documents like letters or speeches)
Secondary sources (articles, books, etc.)
Audio files (podcasts, interviews, etc.)
Online databases (Academic Search Complete, JSTOR, LexisNexis)
Tertiary sources (reviews of other people's research and analysis of your topics

Bibliographies

When conducting research for your essay, be sure to use academic sources only!

Academic sources are those written by experts in their field who have been published in peer-reviewed journals or books and are therefore considered credible resources for learning more about any given topic.

Academic sources will always include citations at the end of each paragraph (or chapter) so that readers can easily identify where they can go if they'd like to learn more about the topic being discussed in each section of the text.

You can use secondary sources for information about your topic, but make sure that they are academically-reputable sources.

Primary sources are also great for finding information, but they provide only one side of the story and should be used with caution.

Overall, try to use a variety of sources as this will strengthen the argument you are defending.

We recommend putting a lot of emphasis on option five (tertiary sources) because it is something that we were not previously familiar with and we believe it should become more known as it is super helpful.

Tertiary sources are those that have been compiled by other people, such as academic journals and published books.

They can be great resources for getting more background information on a topic, but they aren't original works of scholarship—so be sure to cite them accordingly!

Quick Bibliographies

As you organize research, there’s no need to get bogged down in how you structure or create your bibliography.

For starters, here’s a simple list of tools for quick bibliographies:

Bibliography.com

3. Putting Your Thoughts On Paper

One of the hardest parts is the beginning of the writing process. You should always keep in mind your thesis statement when you write.

It's easy to get carried away with details and forget what you're trying to say—but if you can keep your thesis statement in mind, it will help you stay focused on the main point of your work.

The writing process is a great way to get started with your research because it helps you organize your thoughts before writing them down into sentences and paragraphs.

You'll be able to take notes faster because everything is already written down for you!

Moving on, an excellent strategy that works best for me is just word vomiting onto a page to get a basis of everything you want to say, and then after that is done, organize and clean up what was written.

This is especially useful if you have collected all the data and you just don't know how to put your thoughts into actual words.

Claim My Free Research Organizer Template

This free research organizer template comes pre-built with folders, subfolders, aesthetic formatting, and much more.

4. The Finishing Touches

If there is anything you should take away from this, it’s to use a reference manager.

Reference managers help ensure that all your citations are correct and up-to-date.

When choosing one, make sure it's compatible with whatever citation style is required by your instructor or institution.

Research doesn't have to be something that you dread or bores you out of your mind.

Being organized can make this process fun and exciting.

So now it's time to put on your thinking cap and get to work.

Talk with a Kahana representative

Fill out your information and a Kahana team representative will reach out to you. Have a simple question? Search our library of articles

Three Tips to Organize Thesis and Article Sources

Whether for a dissertation, thesis, or class research paper, a literature review may expose you to hundreds of research papers that could contribute to your understanding of the field and possibly even be cited in a manuscript. So how do you keep track of these sources?

Here, I’ll describe three options for you to consider: keep an annotated bibliography, use spreadsheets, and use a citation management software.

Tip 1: Keep an Annotated Bibliography

An annotated bibliography is going to be a list of the sources that you’ve read along with important notes to explain the source’s importance and relevance to your research. While some people do this by hand, that can be laborious, particularly when you are searching for a source after the fact. My suggestion for the modern annotated bibliography is to use a searchable format such as Word, Rmarkdown, OneNote, EndNote, etc. These options allow you to easily re-reference a source and (re)identify sources that talk about particular concepts. To maximize your annotated bibliography, there are several key components to include in each entry (and here’s a worksheet ):

Citation — In addition to the author(s) and year of publication, you should also make a note of the doi (so you can find it later using https://doi.org/[insert doi] ), and the filename of the pdf. The filename is especially important since it allows you to find the pdf you already have, without opening 20 files one-by-one.

Methods — Are any of the methods used especially relevant to your work? This might be because you need the protocol, they are key to interpreting the data, and/or are insufficient (i.e., they provide an opportunity for you to improve the field).

Results — What are the key results and findings? What figure is central to their story?

Limitations — What are the limitations of the research? What could be done differently to improve the robustness of the research?

Your thoughts — What do you think about the paper? Use this as an opportunity to present your unfiltered thoughts, feelings, musings, and big ideas. That way you can find them later.

Follow up — Are there any references that you should read in the future?

Tip 2: Keep a Spreadsheet

Spreadsheets are another great option for keeping track of the sources you’ve identified in a searchable and easy to skim format. In this case, you would likely include more granular information about the source’s origins, citations, accessibility, etc. However, what you include may depend on how you plan to use the document.

For example, Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega uses a “Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump” . In addition to basic citation information, Dr. Pacheco-Vega includes columns to capture his thoughts on each references as well as cross references and potential quotations. It’s very much like a horizontally organized annotated bibliography.

For a more basic compilation of sources, Eastern Washington University has a sample chart that you can use to build your own and Kathleen Clarke describes a slightly more intricate method that links spreadsheet entries to easy file identification. More visual, or more easily overwhelmed, writers might consider adding a color-coordination system to their spreadsheets.

Tip 3: Use a Citation Management System

Citation management systems can be great tools for keeping track of relevant sources. I used to recommend Mendeley, however, it was put behind a paywall and underwent changes that make it more difficult to use and export your references if needed.

The open source (free) tool, Zotero is now one of the best options available for tracking and organizing sources. Not only does it have a browser extension to directly import references as you find them, it has an extensive reference and bibliography generation system. These can be easily formatted for text editors and used directly with Word, LibreOffice, and Google Docs. Zotero also features some handy organization and collaboration tools.

The more visual academics might want to consider Diigo . With both free and paid options, this program features tools to tag, archive, annotate, organize, and even share your online research (much like Zotero does). The most innovative tool, however, is one that enables you to sort your sources into a structured outline, potentially allowing you to more easily identify weak or understudied parts of your research.

What’s the Best Way to Organize My Research? | A librarian breaks down how to approach and organize your literature review process.

Organizing Your Literature: Spreadsheet Style | Describes an adaptable, nested spreadsheet organization system and how it can link to and help organize your file storage.

Tips for Organizing Sources for Research Papers | A basic review of the types of sources, how to get your literature review started, and some potential ways to stay organized.

4 Must-Have Tools to Find and Organize Research Articles for a Literature Review | A video with tips on using Elicit, Research Rabbit, Notion, and Zotero together to gather and organize your research.

15 Best Free Web Tools to Organize Your Research | Broken into two lists of web tools: one for research and study and the second for writing.

How to Organize Research Articles | A non-traditional approach using a knowledge monetization platform (Kahana) to organize and share your academic research (for free).

Ada K. Hagan, Ph.D.

Owner, lead consultant.

I am a microbiologist with a passion for making science accessible. I hope to use my background in communications and higher education to help make scientific concepts more easily understood and make the academy more inclusive to future scientists from all backgrounds.

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

9 Organizing Research: Taking and Keeping Effective Notes

Once you’ve located the right primary and secondary sources, it’s time to glean all the information you can from them. In this chapter, you’ll first get some tips on taking and organizing notes. The second part addresses how to approach the sort of intermediary assignments (such as book reviews) that are often part of a history course.

Honing your own strategy for organizing your primary and secondary research is a pathway to less stress and better paper success. Moreover, if you can find the method that helps you best organize your notes, these methods can be applied to research you do for any of your classes.

Before the personal computing revolution, most historians labored through archives and primary documents and wrote down their notes on index cards, and then found innovative ways to organize them for their purposes. When doing secondary research, historians often utilized (and many still do) pen and paper for taking notes on secondary sources. With the advent of digital photography and useful note-taking tools like OneNote, some of these older methods have been phased out – though some persist. And, most importantly, once you start using some of the newer techniques below, you may find that you are a little “old school,” and might opt to integrate some of the older techniques with newer technology.

Whether you choose to use a low-tech method of taking and organizing your notes or an app that will help you organize your research, here are a few pointers for good note-taking.

Principles of note-taking

If you are going low-tech, choose a method that prevents a loss of any notes. Perhaps use one spiral notebook, or an accordion folder, that will keep everything for your project in one space. If you end up taking notes away from your notebook or folder, replace them—or tape them onto blank pages if you are using a notebook—as soon as possible.
If you are going high-tech, pick one application and stick with it. Using a cloud-based app, including one that you can download to your smart phone, will allow you to keep adding to your notes even if you find yourself with time to take notes unexpectedly.
When taking notes, whether you’re using 3X5 note cards or using an app described below, write down the author and a shortened title for the publication, along with the page number on EVERY card. We can’t emphasize this point enough; writing down the bibliographic information the first time and repeatedly will save you loads of time later when you are writing your paper and must cite all key information.
Include keywords or “tags” that capture why you thought to take down this information in a consistent place on each note card (and when using the apps described below). If you are writing a paper about why Martin Luther King, Jr., became a successful Civil Rights movement leader, for example, you may have a few theories as you read his speeches or how those around him described his leadership. Those theories—religious beliefs, choice of lieutenants, understanding of Gandhi—might become the tags you put on each note card.
Note-taking applications can help organize tags for you, but if you are going low tech, a good idea is to put tags on the left side of a note card, and bibliographic info on the right side.

Organizing research- applications that can help

Using images in research.

If you are in an archive: make your first picture one that includes the formal collection name, the box number, the folder name and call numbe r and anything else that would help you relocate this information if you or someone else needed to. Do this BEFORE you start taking photos of what is in the folder.
If you are photographing a book or something you may need to return to the library: take a picture of all the front matter (the title page, the page behind the title with all the publication information, maybe even the table of contents).

Once you have recorded where you find it, resist the urge to rename these photographs. By renaming them, they may be re-ordered and you might forget where you found them. Instead, use tags for your own purposes, and carefully name and date the folder into which the photographs were automatically sorted. There is one free, open-source program, Tropy , which is designed to help organize photos taken in archives, as well as tag, annotate, and organize them. It was developed and is supported by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. It is free to download, and you can find it here: https://tropy.org/ ; it is not, however, cloud-based, so you should back up your photos. In other cases, if an archive doesn’t allow photography (this is highly unlikely if you’ve made the trip to the archive), you might have a laptop on hand so that you can transcribe crucial documents.

Using note or project-organizing apps

When you have the time to sit down and begin taking notes on your primary sources, you can annotate your photos in Tropy. Alternatively, OneNote, which is cloud-based, can serve as a way to organize your research. OneNote allows you to create separate “Notebooks” for various projects, but this doesn’t preclude you from searching for terms or tags across projects if the need ever arises. Within each project you can start new tabs, say, for each different collection that you have documents from, or you can start new tabs for different themes that you are investigating. Just as in Tropy, as you go through taking notes on your documents you can create your own “tags” and place them wherever you want in the notes.

Another powerful, free tool to help organize research, especially secondary research though not exclusively, is Zotero found @ https://www.zotero.org/ . Once downloaded, you can begin to save sources (and their URL) that you find on the internet to Zotero. You can create main folders for each major project that you have and then subfolders for various themes if you would like. Just like the other software mentioned, you can create notes and tags about each source, and Zotero can also be used to create bibliographies in the precise format that you will be using. Obviously, this function is super useful when doing a long-term, expansive project like a thesis or dissertation.

How History is Made: A Student’s Guide to Reading, Writing, and Thinking in the Discipline Copyright © 2022 by Stephanie Cole; Kimberly Breuer; Scott W. Palmer; and Brandon Blakeslee is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Knowledge Base
Starting the research process

A Beginner's Guide to Starting the Research Process

When you have to write a thesis or dissertation , it can be hard to know where to begin, but there are some clear steps you can follow.

The research process often begins with a very broad idea for a topic you’d like to know more about. You do some preliminary research to identify a problem . After refining your research questions , you can lay out the foundations of your research design , leading to a proposal that outlines your ideas and plans.

This article takes you through the first steps of the research process, helping you narrow down your ideas and build up a strong foundation for your research project.

Step 1: choose your topic, step 2: identify a problem, step 3: formulate research questions, step 4: create a research design, step 5: write a research proposal, other interesting articles.

First you have to come up with some ideas. Your thesis or dissertation topic can start out very broad. Think about the general area or field you’re interested in—maybe you already have specific research interests based on classes you’ve taken, or maybe you had to consider your topic when applying to graduate school and writing a statement of purpose .

Even if you already have a good sense of your topic, you’ll need to read widely to build background knowledge and begin narrowing down your ideas. Conduct an initial literature review to begin gathering relevant sources. As you read, take notes and try to identify problems, questions, debates, contradictions and gaps. Your aim is to narrow down from a broad area of interest to a specific niche.

Make sure to consider the practicalities: the requirements of your programme, the amount of time you have to complete the research, and how difficult it will be to access sources and data on the topic. Before moving onto the next stage, it’s a good idea to discuss the topic with your thesis supervisor.

>>Read more about narrowing down a research topic

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So you’ve settled on a topic and found a niche—but what exactly will your research investigate, and why does it matter? To give your project focus and purpose, you have to define a research problem .

The problem might be a practical issue—for example, a process or practice that isn’t working well, an area of concern in an organization’s performance, or a difficulty faced by a specific group of people in society.

Alternatively, you might choose to investigate a theoretical problem—for example, an underexplored phenomenon or relationship, a contradiction between different models or theories, or an unresolved debate among scholars.

To put the problem in context and set your objectives, you can write a problem statement . This describes who the problem affects, why research is needed, and how your research project will contribute to solving it.

>>Read more about defining a research problem

Next, based on the problem statement, you need to write one or more research questions . These target exactly what you want to find out. They might focus on describing, comparing, evaluating, or explaining the research problem.

A strong research question should be specific enough that you can answer it thoroughly using appropriate qualitative or quantitative research methods. It should also be complex enough to require in-depth investigation, analysis, and argument. Questions that can be answered with “yes/no” or with easily available facts are not complex enough for a thesis or dissertation.

In some types of research, at this stage you might also have to develop a conceptual framework and testable hypotheses .

>>See research question examples

The research design is a practical framework for answering your research questions. It involves making decisions about the type of data you need, the methods you’ll use to collect and analyze it, and the location and timescale of your research.

There are often many possible paths you can take to answering your questions. The decisions you make will partly be based on your priorities. For example, do you want to determine causes and effects, draw generalizable conclusions, or understand the details of a specific context?

You need to decide whether you will use primary or secondary data and qualitative or quantitative methods . You also need to determine the specific tools, procedures, and materials you’ll use to collect and analyze your data, as well as your criteria for selecting participants or sources.

>>Read more about creating a research design

Finally, after completing these steps, you are ready to complete a research proposal . The proposal outlines the context, relevance, purpose, and plan of your research.

As well as outlining the background, problem statement, and research questions, the proposal should also include a literature review that shows how your project will fit into existing work on the topic. The research design section describes your approach and explains exactly what you will do.

You might have to get the proposal approved by your supervisor before you get started, and it will guide the process of writing your thesis or dissertation.

>>Read more about writing a research proposal

If you want to know more about the research process , methodology , research bias , or statistics , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

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Research bias

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Home – AI for Research

What’s the best way to organize my research?

The following post is partially based on a blog post written by Heather Campbell at Brescia University College which is no longer active.

As the old saying goes: “for every minute spent organizing, an hour is earned”, this is as true for research work as it is for most other tasks. In this post, we’ll explore the various facets involved in organizing your research, from setting a proper reading schedule, to covering note-taking and publishing.

Step 1: Reading

Research is all about reading, reading and more reading. As Isaac Newton reminds us, to see further than others, one needs to stand on the shoulder of giants. However, in order to do so, one first needs to understand the work of those giants in order to stand on their shoulders. Understanding the research field is of paramount importance. Back in my days as a PhD student, I was told to look at it in terms of a landscape. Understanding your field is akin to walking around a great landscape, all the hills, valleys and mountain tops represent the various authors who have been prolific and influenced those fields. The mountain tops are those who’ve been cited more than others, and the deep valleys represent those unfortunate souls whose work has been discredited or otherwise dismissed. The more you read about your subject, the more entrenched you’ll become and after a while, you’ll be able to recognize how to position a paper just by glancing at the references.

So how do we form a structured reading strategy? There is of course no one-size-fit-all but there are some good tips to consider, namely:

Start out with some preliminary reading . Skim through the most popular and well-cited papers in the field that you’re examining. Initially, you’d want to skim through a range of various papers to establish the dominant authors in the field.

Pick out the most influential authors in your research area and read their most popular papers in depth. To understand the current paradigm, you have to know the foundational papers. Depending on the research area, these authors may be either contemporary or situated in history.

Always conduct your research with your final product in mind . While reading through your papers, consider potential “subheadings” that may be useful for your own research, and make sure to save sections/paragraphs/figures that you find useful and relevant to your own work.

Use a research journal / a research plan . To see how far you have ventured, it is necessary to be aware of where you were when you started. By keeping a research journal, you can keep track of the search phrases you’ve used and keep detailed logs of which keywords yielded useful results. To read more about how to construct a research journal, see this post by Nappa Valley College.

If you do start to find useful stuff…

2. Write your notes

Organize your paper by listing potential “subheadings” or sections . There are various different ways of doing this:

Draw out a working outline: map out some potential subheadings or sections that need to be included in your paper? What is the overall argument that is being made? What are the type of sources that support or critique that point?

Color code : assign different colors to your respective subheadings. Use a highlighter to highlight sections in the text of your articles that are useful. (This feature is upcoming in the new version of Avidnote – stay tuned!), you can also vary the font color to organize your notes and papers.

Use different notebooks: On Avidnote you can do this by creating a notebook and then assigning your notes to that notebook. There are different ways of doing this. You can categorize notebook by category (e.g. empirical studies, qualitative studies etc) or by their status (papers I’ve read, papers I’ve already cited, papers I need to look into etc). If you’re not using Avidnote, you can mimic this by creating different folders on your computer and do it manually. Either way, make sure you keep things together!

Keep notes on why your sources are helpful . It’s good to remind yourself why a particular paper is useful, how does it connect to your own research, and how may it support/critique your own findings?

Summary of papers : Make a short summary of the papers that you’ve found to be useful. Include the paper’s most important contribution, and how it relates to your research, as well as any potentially interesting figures or tables. You can do this on Avidnote by using the template for summarizing research papers.

Create annotations : whenever you read an interesting/useful section in a paper, make sure to leave an annotation that highlights that sentence. In the corresponding note, jot down why that sentence was important.

Use your own words : Always write your notes using your own words. You need to make sure you’ve understood what you’re reading. When you write it down using your own words, it may be conducive to memorization and helping you to learn better.

Save everything and BACKUP. Always good to save everything you write.

Create a working bibliography using Zotero. Why Zotero? It’s open-source for one thing, and we’re currently working on integrating it with Avidnote as well. Add new resources that you find to your online Zotero bibliography as you dwell deeper into your research.

Are you ready to start writing…

3. Start writing.

Write in a non-linear fashion . You shouldn’t begin by writing your abstract, in fact, the abstract should often be the last thing that you write (as it provides an overview/summary of your paper). The same thing goes for your entire paper, write each section in whichever order seems most suitable. If you’re collecting data, you may want to start writing your methodology. If you’re already familiar with the area, you could begin writing you theoretical frame of reference. However you wish to begin, make sure to remember, that the writing process is iterative!

Iterative writing process

Seeing as the writing process is iterative, this means that your paper should be treated as a living organism. At times, you may want to update your introduction if you discovered something that needed to be added. Likewise, your results may show you some weakness in your methodology, which should make reconsider changing the methodology and its corresponding section.

Remember that your first version is always a draft, rarely does a masterpiece come from a draft! Treat it as such, and don’t be afraid to write down sentences that haven’t been clearly thought out. You’ll have time to revise that once you’ve written down a rough draft. See this old post of mine for clarification on this point.

If you’re working on the same research project for an extended period of time, you may notice that you’ll get new ideas when you’re walking around or doing mundane tasks, make sure to jot down these ideas on your phone lest you forget them.

There are different apps/software that make a lot of these steps easier (refer to Avidnote for note-taking and Zotero for referencing). If you prefer to use digital tools, the above apps will be useful to you. If you prefer to still take notes by hand, you may consider something like the Cornell Note-Taking system to organize your notes.

So what system works for you? Feel free to leave a suggestion or comment below!

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Research Process :: Step by Step

Introduction
Select Topic
Identify Keywords
Background Information
Develop Research Questions
Refine Topic
Search Strategy
Popular Databases
Evaluate Sources
Types of Periodicals
Reading Scholarly Articles
Primary & Secondary Sources
Organize / Take Notes
Writing & Grammar Resources
Annotated Bibliography
Literature Review
Citation Styles
Paraphrasing
Privacy / Confidentiality
Zotero Guide by Morgan Rowe-Morris Last Updated Jun 6, 2024 4540 views this year
EndNote Guide by John Bayhi Last Updated Jun 12, 2024 2610 views this year

Focus on the information in the article that is relevant to your research question (you may be able to skim over other parts). Think critically about what you read and build your argument based on it.

Organize your Notes

After you take notes, re-read them.
Then re-organize them by putting similar information together. Working with your notes involves re-grouping them by topic instead of by source. Re-group your notes by re-shuffling your index cards or by color-coding or using symbols to code notes in a notebook.
Review the topics of your newly-grouped notes. If the topics do not answer your research question or support your working thesis directly, you may need to do additional research or re-think your original research.
During this process you may find that you have taken notes that do not answer your research question or support your working thesis directly. Don't be afraid to throw them away.

It may have struck you that you just read a lot of "re" words: re-read, re-organize, re-group, re-shuffle, re-think. That's right; working with your notes essentially means going back and reviewing how this "new" information fits with your own thoughts about the topic or issue of the research.

Grouping your notes will enable you to outline the major sections and then the paragraphs of your research paper.

https://www.esc.edu/online-writing-center/resources/research/research-paper-steps/taking-notes/

<< Previous: Step 4: Write
Next: Writing & Grammar Resources >>
Last Updated: Sep 5, 2024 1:38 PM
URL: https://libguides.uta.edu/researchprocess

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Structured Qualitative Research: Organizing “Mountains of Words” for Data Analysis, both Qualitative and Quantitative

Qualitative research creates mountains of words. U.S. federal funding supports mostly structured qualitative research, which is designed to test hypotheses using semi-quantitative coding and analysis. The authors have 30 years of experience in designing and completing major qualitative research projects, mainly funded by the US National Institute on Drug Abuse [NIDA]. This article reports on strategies for planning, organizing, collecting, managing, storing, retrieving, analyzing, and writing about qualitative data so as to most efficiently manage the mountains of words collected in large-scale ethnographic projects. Multiple benefits accrue from this approach. Several different staff members can contribute to the data collection, even when working from remote locations. Field expenditures are linked to units of work so productivity is measured, many staff in various locations have access to use and analyze the data, quantitative data can be derived from data that is primarily qualitative, and improved efficiencies of resources are developed. The major difficulties involve a need for staff who can program and manage large databases, and who can be skillful analysts of both qualitative and quantitative data.

The Problem

Qualitative research creates Mountains of Words . No matter how large or small the project, the qualitative methodology depends primarily upon eliciting self-reports from subjects or observations made in the field that are transcribed into field notes. Even a small qualitative project easily generates thousands of words. Major ethnographic projects easily generate millions of words. Fortunately recent advances in computer technology and software have made it possible to manage these mountains of words more efficiently, as described below. At every step of conducting research using qualitative methods, researchers and research teams face daunting problems of how to organize, collect, manage, store, retrieve, analyze, and give meaning to the information obtained during qualitative research. This article focuses upon strategies and experiences of the authors, who have conducted a wide variety of research projects which are primarily qualitative in their focus, although some have also included quantitative components. This focus reflects their experience in organizing large qualitative projects so as to routinely manage the data flows into a comprehensive database so as to make subsequent analysis of these data as efficient as possible.

Quantitative research projects ask pre-coded questions and assign numeric values to responses; such pre-coded answers can be analyzed by the straightforward methods delineated in programs like SAS, SPSS, or STATA. By contrast, qualitative research is far less structured and cannot be easily converted into numbers that can be analyzed by such statistical packages.

The field of anthropology continues to have a tradition of a lone investigator conducting fieldwork, often in a foreign country, collecting qualitative data which only they know and understand, and must subsequently analyze for publication—but this is quite rare. During the past 25 years, the U.S. federal government, through the various institutes of the National Institutes of Health and Department of Education, has provided increased funding to support qualitative researchers to address numerous topics. Increasingly, researchers who rely primarily upon federal funding to support qualitative research must grapple with review committees and funding decisions which increasingly insist that qualitative researchers obtain and analyze data to build towards (or include) a quantitative component. This is due to the fact that quantitative research constitutes the dominant methodological paradigm for most social science research supported by governments and foundations. Moreover, most scientific theories and hypotheses are formulated to be answered by quantitative approaches. Review committees often want larger samples, inclusion of special populations, and higher levels of abstraction and theory testing than can be accomplished by smaller qualitative research projects. Even when fortunate enough to receive a federal grant to conduct qualitative research, many problems confront the skilled qualitative researcher. Some urban ethnography is now conducted with multiple ethnographers and field workers; this involves training, coordinating, and structuring the work of those who will conduct the actual research, and systematically recording qualitative information that will often be analyzed by persons who did not collect it. We will call this structured qualitative research . By this we mean that the investigator proposes to study a rather specific topic, and outlines in considerable detail the various dimensions or lines of inquiry that the project will be designed to elicit. While many qualitative researchers make substantial attempts to structure their research, so as to obtain rich responses from subjects and well-written field notes, the careful structuring of qualitative protocols, systematic use of databases for storage, retrieval, and management of the mountains of words collected, and other efficiencies described below represent important advances for qualitative researchers to consider.

An additional expectation from grant and peer reviewers is that the investigator will propose specific hypotheses and analyze the qualitative data by employing analytic approaches that are what we call semi-quantitative . This means that some segments of textual data will be coded in such a way that it allows for rough numerical counts or proportions to be reported along with typical quotes from qualitative respondents. That is, a small portion of the Mountains of Words is partially converted from textual data into assigned numbers or variables that can be counted and employed like quantitative data sets. The structured qualitative research reported here has generated a coding system that permits individual interview responses to be converted into numeric codes for subsequent quantitative analysis. This article will report on strategies for planning, organizing, collecting, managing, storing, retrieving, coding, analyzing, and writing so that qualitative methods can most efficiently manage the Mountain of Words collected in large-scale ethnographic projects. With this focus in mind, we will report on strategies for handling textual data, and not with many other important issues that arise in qualitative research. Other articles in this special issue address important topics—which this article only mentions in passing. The authors have also addressed such issues in prior publications.

For example, this article ignores issues associated with human subjects, informed consent 1 (Dunlap and Johnson 2005), sampling of respondents, safety in field settings (Dunlap and Johnson 1992; Williams et al 1992 ;), and many other related issues (although they may be mentioned in passing). Rather, the authors focus upon several key stages or procedures which support structured qualitative research for managing, eliciting, and analyzing Mountains of Words.

The authors have engaged in several major qualitative research projects, with a primary focus upon patterns of illicit drug use and distribution. All of these projects have been funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). The senior author, Johnson, was trained as a quantitative researcher at Columbia University, but has been associated with several leading ethnographers and qualitative researchers during his career. The second author, Dunlap, was primarily trained as a qualitative researcher at University of California at Berkeley, while the third author, Benoit, has training in historical methods and qualitative research at New York University. All three have worked together on several different qualitative research projects. From 1988 to the present, Johnson and Dunlap have conducted qualitative studies on crack distribution and substance abuse, crack and crime, and several others involving quantitative studies of arrestees. Recently, Dunlap and Johnson have conducted qualitative studies of household violence, transient domesticity, marijuana and blunts, and most recently studies of drug markets in New Orleans and Houston following Hurricane Katrina. Each of these studies has involved very similar qualitative methods for framing research questions, developing qualitative protocols, organizing data, storing and managing textual data, and then analyzing the data. These projects have resulted in close to 100 different publications since 1990 in a wide variety of journals and books. Some of these are cited at different points in the analysis that follows.

We also recognize that many other ethnographers have conducted excellent qualitative studies, and arrived at different solutions and uses of software, and analyzed both qualitative and quantitative data, resulting in the publication of peer-reviewed articles. Such researchers may find our experience helpful at improving their efficiency in managing the Mountain of Words in their future research. Likewise, colleagues conducting research outside the USA and international settings may find these experiences informative.

A central conclusion which has been widely noted by many qualitative researchers is that continuing and recent advances in computer hardware (almost all computers in 2008 have extensive RAM and hard drive storage capacity) ( Fielding and Lee 1991 ), software ( Bazeley 2002 , MacMillan and Koenig 2004 ), internet access ( Mann and Stewart 2000 ), and cellular communication technology has transformed the efficiency for managing mountains of words ( Mangabeira, Lee and Fielding 2004 ). The strategies reported below are based on efficient use of some of this technology. Nevertheless, the authors struggle to keep up with and use these technological advances—a struggle that will continue in the foreseeable future. We address how researchers can most efficiently use such technological advances to conduct their qualitative research on a wide range of topics.

In the authors’ experience, most qualitative analysis programs, such as Ethnograph ( Sidel and Friese 1998 ), Atlas ( Muhr 2005 ), Nudist ( Crowley, Harré, Tagg 2002 ), Nvivo ( Bazeley 2002 ), and others have major limitations (see Barry 1998 ; Brent and Slusarz 2003 , Gilbert et al 2004, MacMillan and Koenig 2004 ) that have proven unsatisfactory for the management of the mountains of words collected in the above-mentioned research projects (also see Manwar, Dunlap, Johnson 1993). The major shortcomings of these programs stem from their being word based. While these programs are efficient in searching for individual words or organizing some collection of words or text, they do so across the entire database. Such programs generate far too many “hits” to systematically retrieve targeted data that is useful for analysis purposes. By contrast, structured qualitative research is organized around questions that are carefully framed by the investigator to systematically elicit answers from respondents. This approach can help qualitative researchers to obtain, store, organize, and analyze the data more efficiently and effectively.

Thus, one of the most fundamental and important decisions in conducting structured qualitative research—which is best made at the beginning of a research project—is the choice of a software program that can integrate information across many different functions and purposes. This allows for one software program to maintain most of the information and data to be collected during qualitative research. During the past nine years, the authors have found one relational database which provides that integrative function. FileMaker_Pro (2007) (now in version 9) is a true relational database that has been successful for managing qualitative data, as well as being a major “storehouse” for answers to individual questions by ethnographic respondents. This product has continuously upgraded its capabilities. Moreover, our staff experience has developed over the years, and they have learned how to employ this program’s capabilities. Staff now can now design, accomplish, and integrate many functions that were previously disconnected in different programs or done by paper and pencil and US mails, as described below.

We currently have three major databases (each is over 60 MB), each containing extensive amounts of qualitative data. We reference our experience and findings from some of these projects to illustrate some of the points made below. These three projects are briefly described here; citations are also provided to published articles that contain more details about the samples and qualitative methods employed.

Marijuana/blunts: This project was a five-year study (2002-2007) in New York City which recruited 100 current and active marijuana users who were longitudinally followed for three to four years; they were re-interviewed on several occasions following a structured qualitative protocol (similar to that described below). In addition, this project developed a quantitative protocol derived from insights gained during the qualitative research in year one. This peer group questionnaire was developed in year two and administered during years two and three; 550 additional respondents completed this protocol (Ream et al 2005, 2006 , 2007, 2008). An additional sub-study recruited marijuana/blunts users who allowed their recent purchase of marijuana to be weighed so that price/gm could be calculated ( Sifaneck et al 2007 ).
Transient domesticity : This study was built upon 10 years of previous qualitative research in the 1990s. An entirely qualitative study (2003-2008), it investigates the role of (often transient) male partners in the households of poor African-American women with children. It documents whether and how violence occurs within the male-female relationship, and how drug use and sales activities impact upon household functioning. Ninety-two carefully selected focal subjects (plus partners and other household members) were recruited in years one and two. These subjects completed a baseline protocol, and most have been re-interviewed approximately every six months during the remaining three years.
Katrina project: This study (2006-2010) is in mid-data collection; this article is among the early publications from this project (also see Johnson, Dunlap, Morse 2007 ). More extensive data analysis is just beginning. This structured qualitative study investigates the reformulation of illicit drug markets among New Orleans evacuees both in New Orleans and in Houston. The staff anticipates that over 150 active drug users and sellers of several illegal drugs will be recruited and interviewed in these two locations. Several focus groups are being conducted. This qualitative project faces the additional difficulty of being conducted at sites (New Orleans and Houston) far removed from the investigator’s work location (New York). Most of the examples provided below are drawn from this project, because of the important advances made in the effective use of the technology and software that make this project innovative. We provide illustrative materials in boxes (labeled as Figures).

Planning structured qualitative research

The most fundamental requirement is to be clear about what the qualitative research project is designed to accomplish. This is especially important when writing a complex application to a federal agency for funding, and hoping that it will be funded after several reviews. The application must propose a specific focus for the research, delineate specific aims, indicate its significance, describe preliminary research, and provide detailed methods and analysis plans. This is where scientific innovation and clarity of purpose are especially important, as only a few applications receive good priority scores, and even fewer receive funding. The aims are provided in the abstract of the Katrina project in Figure 1 .

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AIMS and Abstract of Katrina Project

Many qualitative research projects are organized around four types of data collection approaches that yield extensive amounts of textual data:

Field notes -- written observations of the field setting that record what is seen, heard, or observed.
Baseline qualitative protocol -- a carefully developed interview schedule that elicit stories and accounts from respondents. Usually interviews are recorded and transcribed, generating large numbers of words. When carefully recorded and transcribed the questions and answers become the data elements.
Follow-up qualitative protocol – this protocol is very similar to the baseline, but often asks fewer questions, requests updates, and provides information needed to study change across time.
Focus group protocols -- the focus group usually involves three to 10 persons who are asked to address a limited group of questions for which they have the expertise to provide illuminating information. In our experience, the more carefully structured each of these types of data collection approaches, the better the quality of data that is elicited. We consider each of these in some detail below.

Depending upon the aims of the project, many other issues may need further elaboration. In the Katrina project, this involved development of question domains regarding time windows and illicit drug markets being studied. The baseline protocol described below includes questions asked of respondents for the month before Katrina, during the week of the Katrina Hurricane and flooding of New Orleans, a month after evacuation from New Orleans, and in the present (in the past 30 days) at the time of the interview. The 30-day window was chosen to reflect a common time period which persons could recall with some accuracy; in fact many respondents reported their recollections without reference to a 30 day window. Likewise, other questions are focused upon a respondent’s participation as a user and/or seller in various illegal markets: cannabis, heroin, crack/cocaine, and other illicit drugs. Many other details are fleshed out in the research methods section of the application and in the development of protocols and data collection devices—as well in other prior publications ( Davis et al 2006 ; Lewis et al 1992 ). These aspects need to be systematically asked and their answers recorded in a highly structured fashion in order to obtain roughly comparable data from a wide variety of participating research subjects.

Training and supervising ethnographic staff

No matter how well conceptualized the qualitative research project has been, actual implementation is fraught with many difficulties. A typical problem involves hiring of qualified staff. The reality is that very few persons have all the requisite qualitative skills for studying illegal drug markets in the field. Investigators must often choose between two types of staff. Persons having good educational credentials (e.g. masters or doctoral level training in qualitative research, persons in anthropology or sociology) often lack street contacts and connections with illegal drug users at research sites. By contrast, “street savvy” persons may have excellent contacts within drug user circles, but lack educational credentials, writing skills, and/or training in qualitative research methods. Social workers with several years of experience often have both the credentials and street savvy to become good ethnographers. Over several years and projects, our experience has been that the “street savvy” person often makes the better field worker because such work enhances their employment record, and so they will remain loyal staff members for the duration of the project and often across several projects. The graduate student or well-educated person often has considerable difficulty accessing illicit drug users and markets; they also often leave before the project ends (due to graduation, higher paid jobs, or other reasons). Our best ethnographers have been persons who have recovered from heroin/crack abuse as young adults, but who have gotten bachelor and masters degrees, and have been trained to routinely write rich field notes and conduct high quality interviews with extensive probing. 2

Far more important than hiring the “right person” is the investigator’s ability to systematically train all staff in the details of the qualitative research process, and give them time to upgrade their skills, until they accomplish it well. Especially in locations (such as New Orleans and Houston) remote from the investigator’s office (in New York City), having doctoral level consultants or co-investigators who can provide ongoing staff supervision greatly enhances the project. At project startup, all staff needs five days or more of training in various procedures and approaches. This involves both formal training and actual practice sessions. Formal training includes:

in-depth discussion about the practical application and reading of previously published articles about entering the field and conducting research among drug users ( Dunlap and Johnson 1998 ; Dunlap et al 1993 ),
maintaining personal safety for both subjects and field staff in dangerous situations ( Williams et al 1992 ),
informed consent procedures approved by the institutional review board,
ethical issues that may arise ( Dunlap and Johnson 2006 ),
the basics of observations and field note writing,
the conduct of personal interviews, and conceptualization of the major issues to be researched,
how to account for and record expenses incurred during the study;
plans for regular staff meetings.

The investigator also needs to ensure that all staff members clearly understand the project’s aims and purpose. The investigator must provide considerable clarity about what each staff person is expected to produce in terms of field notes and interviews during a week or month. The initial training usually does not include development of protocols, which comes later. This training also includes instruction in how to follow detailed written procedures for submission of textual data or recordings (described in more detail below).

An important component of training staff occurs via role-playing, so as to develop experience in observation and field note writing, interviewing, and other skills that are expected. When each staff member can effectively demonstrate their skills via role playing, they are sent into the field setting to begin work and practice their skills. Training in observations and writing field notes educates staff about how to enter the field and make the ethnographers’ presence known and accepted. It also leads to discussion about the difficulties and inconsistencies that the main work will entail. After initial training, a most important activity is to provide regular ongoing supervision—biweekly staff conference calls usually can accomplish this. It is easier to monitor quantity of production than the quality of work this way because writing field notes and awaiting transcription of interviews takes more time. Ethnographers also need to conduct their research outside of regular business hours; they need to adjust their work schedule to fit the typical work hours of potential subjects—active drug users and sellers, in the Katrina project.

Recording and managing units of work

As staff begin conducting the qualitative research activity, they need to be trained, directed, and supervised to routinely create units of work . A good operational definition in qualitative research: a unit of work is equivalent to a file—usually written in Microsoft Word—that describes staff effort accomplished at a specific date, time, location, and with a particular focus. This is especially important with regard to field notes. Moreover, each unit of work needs to have “header information” that is standard across all units of work. The field worker records a file name, date, the approximate time, his or her name and location, description of subject(s) or other information as requested. The header used in the Katrina study is provided in figure 2 . The controlling feature is the filename, in which is embedded: the type of work done (field note or voice recorded interview, the staff member who collected data, the date it was collected, and whether it refers to a specific respondent or not. The additional information in the header needs to be systematically recorded. The information in the header will become a field in the FileMaker Pro database, which organizes all the units of work for analysis at a later time.

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Example of Header Information and an Observation Only Field Note.

When a field note is written, or other units of work created, it is critically important that each ethnographer maintain every file they generate on their own computer for subsequent cross checking. They should also print out and maintain paper copies of their units of work for ease of cross checking the specific units of work with the staff maintaining the integrating project data base (see below). All field notes and units of work need to be routinely submitted or uploaded electronically to the central data repository of the project (as described below).

Observations and descriptive field notes

One of the most important skills for ethnographers is the ability to enter a field setting, make systematic observations, hold informal conversations with persons present and screen for “persons of interest”--in our case those involved as consumers or sellers of illegal drugs. Sometimes their observations may result in new contacts or in no contacts and yet provide interesting information that needs to be recorded (e.g. a community demonstration against destruction of public housing in New Orleans). At other times staff will conduct informal conversations as they go about their work. A major difficulty can arise here. Staff needs considerable pressure and supervision to routinely generate field notes about each unit of work. In a large-scale qualitative research project, each field note is the rough equivalent of a short interview in a quantitative research project. The ethnographers needs considerable self-discipline to make 1-3 hours of direct observations in the field, and then spend several hours writing field notes based upon those observations. Indeed, writing the field notes may take more time than making the observations. The field notes need to be very descriptive of what was observed, without being judgmental or disrespectful of the behaviors observed or the lifestyle of the people observed. Many staff may lack skills in writing clear sentences, reproducing interactions or informal conversations with potential subjects, and developing extensive and thickly descriptive field notes. It often takes much time and intensive supervision to get staff both trained and systematically supervised to write excellent field notes. Having ethnographers write descriptive field notes is much more important than the grammar and sentence structure. The important issue is whether the field note coveys clearly what happened/was observed. Further, since observations are focused upon persons engaged in illegal behaviors (drug sales), observations will need to include interpretations of the meanings implied by words used by respondents—as well as what might be learned by returning for additional observations later. Our experience has been that each unit of work must have its own field note. Thus, if a field worker makes observations at three different locations, each of those locations needs to result in a separate field note because it is a unique setting and a different unit of work. Due to the need to maintain confidentiality of respondents (who have given informed consent) and potential respondents or persons present in field settings (who do not know of the ethnographer’s role), no cameras of any kind are employed.

Likewise, if the interviewer conducts a personal interview with a subject that covers only the first 25 questions in the protocol, they need to write a field note about that unit of work and clearly indicate that they covered only these 25 questions. It would be another unit of work when they conduct another interview that covers the last set of questions. Two types of field notes will be generated: “Linked field notes” describe contacts with or interviews with a specific person chosen as a research subject. If that subject is contacted or observed in the field on other dates, each different contact should have its own field note with a different file name, but that person’s ID number is recorded in the file name and the header.

“Observation only field notes” result when the ethnographer goes into the field and only observes the general scene and maybe has informal conversations with unknown persons (not research subjects); such a field note should record what was observed (without using actual names). In the Katrina project, staff have found it important to also document that “nothing is happening” or that no one was observed at specific locations where previously active drug distribution was observed.

Across several weeks and months of data collection, numerous field notes get written, and expenses associated with conducting field research and payments for interviews begin to pile up. Keeping track of all these units of work becomes extremely cumbersome and time consuming when using only paper files. Managing paper files was especially problematic in New Orleans, as mail service (both pickup and delivery), was severely disrupted by the flooding of most local post offices. Electricity and especially internet service was far more reliable than conventional mail six months after the Hurricane.

Managing expenses and units of work

During the first nine months of the Katrina project, staff recorded their interviews and field notes and submitted them on diskettes and/or paper files to the central office where the data was stored. This rapidly bogged down all project work because ethnographers spent too much time keeping track of paper work and several paper copies were lost in the mails. Some other mechanism was needed. Fortunately, the organization’s [National Development and Research Institutes, Inc.-NDRI] network and web-based software has now developed to the point where data can be recorded electronically and uploaded successfully across vast distances, with confidentiality ensured by double password protection. As a result, FileMaker Pro was able to integrate two major data management functions that were very time consuming and error prone.

Field expenses

While conducting ethnographic research, staff in New Orleans and Houston drive vast distances to meet with subjects or to make observations, thus incurring mileage expenses. In addition they purchase sodas or food for potential subjects while making observations. When qualitative protocols are conducted, they provide incentives for completing interviews. Previously each of these expenses needed to be recorded on paper receipts and submitted on a timely basis to ensure reimbursement. 3 Instead, we now use programmer-developed scripts in FileMaker Pro that computerized the recording of field expenses. Further, each field note was linked to its associated expenses. Ethnographers in Houston and New Orleans go to a specified website on the Internet and enter expense information directly into the project database in New York. Staff members enter each type of expense associated with each unit of work (a field note or personal interview), effectively billing the project for those units of work. For auditing purposes, a reconciliation of expenses is generated and submitted to the fiscal department. The project advances money via funds transfer directly into the ethnographers’ personal bank accounts. This procedure substantially reduces the time devoted to accounting for field expenses and provides nearly instantaneous recording of expenses and advances to the ethnographer. Figure 3 displays a screen shot of the expenses associated with a field note and personal interviews.

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Screen shot from File Maker Pro of Expenses associated with one Field note and two personal interviews.

Uploading field notes and files

The web-based interface now enables ethnographers in remote sites to directly submit their work to the central repository on the NDRI network. On a routine basis, ethnographers now upload each and every field note via the internet. In addition, digital voice files recorded during personal interviews (see below), often 5-20 megabytes in size, are required to be uploaded to the project repository. This means that staff no longer need to mail diskettes or CDs containing their work to New York. Virtually all raw data files submitted by staff members are now stored electronically in the project repository where one administrator is responsible for keeping the data flow organized. Staff conference calls scheduled every two weeks enable the investigators to provide feedback about the quality of work by ethnographic staff, and to discuss emergent findings.

Protocols for eliciting rich qualitative data

After several weeks of ethnographic observations and systematic review of field notes, and drawing upon the collective experience of the research team, staff members collaborate to develop a protocol that is specifically designed to elicit rich qualitative data. This involves several meetings with all staff present, usually several drafts of each question, reorganization of question order, and clarification about the major focus of the project. Two general classes of questions are developed. “Concrete questions” are designed to measure relatively common roles or phenomena, such as demographics (gender, ethnicity, age) and education, residence and residential locations, etc.; these are fairly easy to develop but often elicit answers that may not be straightforward to code. By contrast, “thematic questions” are designed to elicit extensive reports and stories about the focal topics of interest (e.g. drug use patterns, drug sales activity, perceptions of illegal drug markets). Five thematic questions from the 15-page qualitative protocol for the Katrina project are provided in figure 4 .

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Questions as written in the structured qualitative protocol. (Five of 101 questions.)

Now let’s talk about during the disaster and before your evacuation from New Orleans. We refer below to DURING KATRINA DISASTER: this began on Aug 29 (Monday) and lasted thru September 6 (Tues) when virtually everyone was evacuated from New Orleans.

In the process of developing structured qualitative protocols, staff develop a lead question about a specific topic, along with several probes to be asked of persons who respond positively. But since all possible probes cannot be included in a protocol, ethnographers also need to be trained to listen carefully, and then ask appropriate probes. This open-ended questioning approach is also seeking the meaning of specific argot terms (e.g. “trees” for marijuana— Johnson et al 2006 ). A serendipitous observation by the subject may provide an insight about tactics to conceal distribution (e.g. a car wash provides a cover for selling).

A key strategy in the development of probes is to ask respondents to “tell us a story” about that topic, with a follow-up question, “is there anything else?” This strategy is designed to let people talk as much as they want to about that topic and provide further interesting details. In their “story” is the rich data which qualitative methodology is so excellent at obtaining. But a major shortcoming of qualitative methodology is that so many follow-up questions can be generated that the interview becomes very long. Another limitation is that respondents often talk about issues that are “off the topic” of the question; they need to be reminded to address the topic.

The Principal Investigator is responsible for developing and finalizing the written interview protocol for purposes of data collection. Project staff also needs careful instruction and systematic training to read a question as written and if necessary repeat it. Likewise, each staff member must be carefully trained to understand the question in the same way. Every question is discussed in detail, with everyone stating their understanding of the purpose of the question and the domain to be tapped. Staff also needs to follow the order of questions in the protocol. They need to clearly state the question number being asked so that the transcriber types the question number and exact words spoken by the interviewer. [The administrator enters data from the transcript into the correct fields in the database, see below.] After the protocol is developed and the staff trained to conduct the protocol, each ethnographer begins to recruit subjects and conduct personal interviews. While completing the informed consent process, each subject is asked to give a preferred code name which is the only identifying information recorded during interviews. Administration of this protocol serves three important functions: 1) the respondent has time to feel comfortable with the ethnographer, 2) the ethnographer develops rapport with the subject and can elicit more honest answers or disclosures, and 3) the respondent provides rich data—their stories—and answers the questions poised by the ethnographer. With a lengthy qualitative protocol such as that used in the Katrina project (with 100 main questions; each with many probes), a given subject may need two to four interview sessions to complete it.

Recording interviews with digital voice recorders

During the 1990s and early 2000s, our qualitative research team used tape recorders containing cassettes on which interviews were recorded. These cassettes would then be submitted to the central repository, and subsequently transcribed. But such cassettes could be lost, some times had bad recording quality, and other limitations. Another major technological advance, digital voice recorders (DVR), now provide much superior sound quality and recording accuracy for about the same price as cassette recorders. DVRs are more compact and easier to use (with training), and eliminate the need for multiple steps involved with handling recorded cassettes. They are especially valuable in field settings where much background noise may interfere with recording. The quality of recording with a DVR can be improved by having a remote microphone directed at the respondent, and by having the interviewer sit near the recording device when asking questions. One drawback of the digital voice recorder is that it is sometimes easy to unintentionally delete a previously recorded file. A second limitation is that digital voice files grow to be very large and become more difficult to handle. Staff members report that it is best to record for a half to three-quarters of an hour on one digital voice file, take a break, and resume the interview but with a different digital voice file. Thus, one interview often has two related digital voice files. All files are electronic digital files that can be easily stored and transmitted using computer technology.

After the interview is complete, the interviewer connects the digital voice recorder to their computer and copies/transfers that voice file into their computer; it is given a filename parallel to the field note protocol, but the voice digital voice file name begins with V(voice) rather than F (field note). After being stored on the ethnographer’s hard drive, each digital voice file can then be easily uploaded via the Internet to the central data repository for this project. Only the field worker has rights (password protected) to upload files into their location in the repository. The confidentiality and anonymity of both the digital voice file and the associated field notes are maintained but recorded in the central repository for subsequent handling.

Managing the central repository

The central repository is the location where all of the original raw data files submitted by the ethnographic staff are stored on a network hard drive (and backed up to CDs). Each staff member has their own unique location for storing their field notes, digital voice files, and transcripts. One administrative staff person is responsible for managing all of the files.

Every field note and digital voice file uploaded by field staff is entered into a spreadsheet that tracks the progress of that unit of work. This spreadsheet is routinely provided to each field worker in order for them to cross check that the central repository contains all the work they have done; if something is missing, the appropriate files are uploaded again.

Each digital voice file is uploaded via the internet to a transcriber who has been specially trained to maintain the confidentiality of these data and to accurately reproduce the exact words spoken by the interviewer and each research subject. After transcription, a Word file containing the transcript is forwarded to the administrator along with the invoice for that transcript; the administrator then pays for and stores the transcript in the central repository for review by the ethnographer who completed that interview. Each digital voice file and its associated transcripts are also tracked for the timeliness, quality, and accuracy of transcribing. The administrator can also correct misspellings, and/or listen to the audio files to resolve “inaudibles.”

Building an integrated qualitative data base

Careful programming of FileMaker Pro provides a highly structured environment in which the administrator effectively copies text from the transcripts and pastes the contents into a field in the relational database. This relational database systematically links each field note and each transcript with the subject ID number and with the name of the ethnographer who generated it, as well as the expenses associated with that unit of work.

The project database is maintained on a network drive that allows several people to work with the database at the same time. This FileMaker Pro database has been programmed so that each question in the structured interview protocol has a location (or field) in the database where a subject’s answer to that question is to be stored. The administrator reviews the Word transcript, then copies and pastes the answers to each question in the appropriate field in the database. The end result is a database which displays the code names and numbers of subjects interviewed in a row at the top of the screen and the answers to each question (with the questions) in fields below. A screenshot of a portion of one subject’s answers from the database is displayed in figure 5 . This also displays the semi-quantitative coding system described below.

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Screen shot from the Katrina Project Database (program: FileMakerPro). These windows contain:

The question as written in the structured qualitative protocol (two examples)
Window containing the text addressing that question, both the interviewer’s question and respondent’s answer.
Semi-quantitative code categories developed for that question.
Numeric code(s) entered by coder based upon the answer (2) and code categories (3).
“Info” button provides demographic information about the subject, interviewer, and date.

The administrator also systematically reviews the database for missing information and blank cells. Data may be missing for a given question because the interviewer has not yet completed the interview with that subject, or the question may have been appropriately skipped following skip instructions in the interview protocol. It is also possible that the interviewer failed to ask the question or get a response to a particular item. Follow-up protocols and interviews with the same subjects can be organized in the same manner as the baseline protocol, but with the follow-up questions added to the list of variables, and recorded as separate interviews. Focus group protocols are also entered into the database, but often these subjects were not part of the main qualitative study and hence have no personal interview. Focus group subjects are handled differently, organized according to the questions asked.

The end result is a large and extensive database containing mountains of words. But the structured organization of the data permits the staff members to efficiently conduct analyses with the database, as described next.

Retrieval of relevant responses for a topic

At the end of 2007, approximately 106 Katrina subjects have been recruited and have completed at least one interview, but the majority has completed the full baseline protocol and their responses are entered into the database. FileMaker Pro offers several ways of accessing this data and generating results specific to a given topic. A straight-forward approach is to select 2-4 questions asked, and then read every respondent’s answers to that question on the screen. The analyst can select sections of text (quotes) and paste them into a working file for later use. The “Info” button provides the analyst with a summary of key information about that respondent (code name, gender, ethnicity, age, date of interview, interviewer).

An important function is the query , a procedure for locating responses to specific questions associated with the topic that the analysts wish to address. The analyst specifies the questions in the interview protocol that they wish to obtain. The query will rapidly return all relevant fields for all subjects for that question. The output from a query can be generated as a Word document, or as an Excel file, or in other files which the analyst might desire. If so desired, only specific subsets of respondents can be queried; for instance, a particular query can be limited to include only those subjects interviewed in New Orleans, or only those engaged in heroin use. Depending on the topic chosen, additional questions in the database may be obtained. For example, the qualitative protocol (and database) contains four questions about violence before Katrina, during Katrina, shortly after Katrina, and at the current time. But many more questions inquire about participation in drug markets in these time periods, and they can be queried and analyzed for relationship to violence. Overall the Katrina database makes access to the information extremely easy to retrieve and use for analysis purposes. But the way that analysis is approached will determine what is retrieved and how it will be analyzed.

Qualitative analysis with the textual data

While the database will provide mountains of words regarding a particular topic, the hard work just begins. The analyst will need to carefully read through several screens of narrative or pages of printout narratives, and try to figure out how to use these data in a report they may wish to develop. A purely qualitative analysis will identify and examine certain themes that emerged from a careful reading of the data. Particularly useful quotes may be identified, copied, and used in the written report. This kind of analysis is especially useful in identifying contradictions between respondent reports and what might be obtained in quantitative analysis. For example, one paper from the Transient Domesticity project analyzed qualitative data about beatings in childhood. When asked, “ Did you receive beatings while growing up in your household ?” more than half of the subjects denied it. However, ethnographic probing and analysis of their stories revealed that a negative answer did not mean the absence of physical assault. Rather, many of the respondents regarded the physical punishments they received as distinct from being “ beaten. ” They provided rich stories about how they had been beaten (from the perspective of the analyst). Some legitimated their punishment as “ spankings ” or as “ deserved .” The published report provides quoted materials from several subjects who reported that they had not been beaten, but actually were, during their childhood as depicted by their stories ( Dunlap Golub Johnson 2003b ; also see Dunlap et al 2003a and Dunlap et al 2006 ). This suggests that the scientific (and layperson’s) understanding of a phenomenon (beatings) may not mean the same thing to respondents and that a “yes or no” answer in a quantitative survey may provide results that seriously under-count the phenomenon—the better data is elicited by probing the subject.

Semi-quantitative coding

Some questions in the interview protocol and answers stored in the database may be especially amenable to transformation into quantitative codes like those used in typical surveys. Generally these involve demographics or other concrete roles. The analyst can code persons according to gender and levels of education. Our experience indicates that respondent answers about their ethnicity and age are often difficult to code into standard close ended categories. For example, when asked to explain their ethnicity, many people provide extensive answers about their ancestor’s ethnicity and backgrounds. Likewise, the simple question, “how old are you?” often elicits a story about where they were born and a variety of evasive answers, so that a specific age is difficult to code. Asking their date of birth more often elicits a standard answer of month, day, and year—from which a specific numeric age can be calculated and assigned. Other relatively easy to code variables include their reported ZIP code of residence, the neighborhood where they reside, who the occupants of their households are, whether they are employed or not, and descriptions of their job type. Although many words may be available in the qualitative dataset, the answers given by most subjects to questions like these can be classified into categories for which numeric codes can be assigned. These quantitative codes—derived from qualitative data—are most useful in describing the characteristics of the persons sampled and/or providing basic descriptives of their background that may be relevant to analyst efforts to provide a written analysis of the topic. Typically such data are presented as percentages in a table accompanying the qualitative analysis of a topic (see Ream et al 2006 ).

Most qualitative research, however, is designed to illuminate phenomena that are not so easily transformed into numeric codes. On any given topic and in answers to interviewers’ questions, respondent stories may be highly differentiated and varied in content. The analyst must read through much textual data trying to locate and understand different themes or uniformity that emerge from respondent stories. This includes identifying textual material (appropriate quotes) that exemplify the themes (or categories) relevant for the written report. The analyst needs to define categories for the different themes and may assign some numeric value to each category. We refer to the process as semi-quantitative coding because the actual referent and the phenomena being so classified are diffuse and not widely understood or agreed upon in American culture. The assignment of such (numeric) semi-quantitative codes also grossly simplifies and possibly reifies the answers given by subjects. But if and when the coding scheme has been generated, the analytic staff can encode each respondent’s answer according to those themes, and classify the responses into numbers. Note that many subject files may be missing data or contain textual information that cannot be coded into any of the classifications. Whether and how to use these semi-quantitative codes will remain the task of the analyst developing a paper.

In the Katrina project, the investigators developed one or two semi-quantitative codes (or variables) for each question in the qualitative protocol. In Figure 5 , the right side contains the semi-quantitative codes (a list of drugs) developed for this question (with codes 0-19). Well-trained coders read the text on the left and decide which codes on the right are mentioned in the text. They then enter the code number(s) in the box in the middle. If multiple codes are appropriate, the coder enters them separated by a space (in this example codes for cocaine (2) and heroin (4) are entered). While the coding process is relatively straightforward, it is very tedious and time consuming. To read and code the Mountain of Words recorded in the Katrina data base, it took several coders approximately half a year to systematically code the 106 subjects. When the coding process was completed, FileMaker Pro enabled export of these codes into an Excel file which was then converted for use in a quantitative program such as SPSS or SAS. This means that the semi-quantitative codes can now be analyzed quantitatively in conjunction with the extensive qualitative data. Future analyses and publications can provide both qualitative and quantitative analyses of these rich data.

One additional software package—gotomypc.com—now permits all project staff (with appropriate password protection) to access and read (and copy data) from the FileMaker Pro database while working from remote sites (e.g. at home, while traveling, or at offices in New Orleans or Houston) without needing to install FileMaker Pro on their remote computer. Thus, all project staff can work on/with the same database, often at the same time.

Creating quantitative protocols from ethnographic insights

One important outcome of qualitative research is to better inform the development of quantitative protocols to develop better information about phenomena of interest. That is, during the collection and analysis of qualitative data, important insights about social processes are uncovered. These insights can be used to develop detailed close-ended codes for inclusion in a quantitative protocol that can then be administered to many additional respondents. While all quantitative protocols will lack the rich detail obtained in qualitative data, quantitative data and results will provide better information about the numbers and proportions of subjects who were actively involved in that topic. With both quantitative and qualitative data, the analysts can write reports that are richer because they contain both numerically viable information and detailed understanding of phenomena.

As an example, one publication ( Sifaneck et al 2007 ) from the Marijuana/Blunts project highlights how the following hypothesis was tested: Advantaged persons pay much more than the less advantaged for their marijuana in NYC. During the first year of research, ethnographers observed that marijuana retail sales units varied from $5 to $50 and more; both marijuana sellers and consumers reported substantial differences in quality and type of marijuana. No one knew the actual weights and price per gram of retail marijuana purchases; all lacked scientific precision. Ethnographic observations among marijuana smokers recruited from a variety of SES groups in NYC also suggested that white middle class consumers usually purchased “cubes” of high quality marijuana for $50 from concealed delivery services, while smokers in poor communities usually purchased “bags” of lower quality marijuana for $10 - $20. A special subproject was designed to collect both qualitative and quantitative data in a systematic fashion. Among their wide contacts, ethnographers were able to recruit marijuana buyers who allowed 99 purchases to be weighed. Each subject collaborated with the ethnographer to weigh a recent marijuana purchase on a digital scale (accurate to 100 th of a gram), and then answered several questions about themselves and the product (gender, ethnicity, SES, dealer type, quality of marijuana, price paid). Independent of the subject’s quality rating, our experienced ethnographers observed and “graded” the quality of the marijuana purchase. Since the subject always retained possession of their marijuana, no legal issues arose. In the analysis of these data, Sifaneck (et al 2007) systematically described the differences (from qualitative data) between “designer” marijuana (usually grown hydroponically with flowering buds preserved by plastic cubes) and “commercial” marijuana (usually grown outdoors, compressed into bricks for transport, and sold in ziplock baggies). Furthermore, designer marijuana was almost exclusively purchased from private delivery services by middle and upper income persons—usually whites with good legal incomes and working in lower Manhattan. Commercial marijuana was sold by a range of distributors including street sellers, storefronts, and some private residences, but rarely by a delivery service. The quantitative analysis of the weights and price data indicate clear differences in price per gram between the purchases of commercial (average $8.20/g) and designer (average $18.02/g) marijuana. Designer purchases were often sold with brand names describing actual strains like Sour Diesel and White Widow; these were only sold in downtown markets to persons who paid $50 (or more) for 2.5 g in a cube. Commercial marijuana purchases were more likely to be made by blacks, uptown (Harlem), via street dealers, and in units of $5, $10, and $20 bags. Imported commercial types Arizona and Chocolate were only found uptown. Logistic regression indicated that the distinction between Designer and Commercial purchases was the most important factor in price paid per gram--more important than [but highly correlated with] gender, ethnicity, dealer type, or location in New York City.

Conclusions

This article provides an overview of the authors’ efforts and experience in efficiently managing Mountains of Words that are collected during large qualitative research projects like the three mentioned above. The planning, organizing, collecting, transcribing, storing, retrieving, coding, and analytic approaches described herein are necessary to facilitate the hard work associated with data analysis and report writing. While the developed procedures may be reasonably efficient and effective in locating and retrieving appropriate and highly relevant qualitative textual segments, the analyst retains the responsibility for all aspects of preparing an article for journal publication. After retrieving a query containing questions and answers that are highly relevant to a given topic, the analyst and research teams will often have to review the text in pages of quoted materials, searching for respondent statements that clearly indicate something about a given theme. Even after identifying such quoted materials, and arranging them according to thematic content, many other issues arise. The analyst will then need to review the relevant scientific literature to frame the key themes or ideas that emerge from ethnographic data, place the research methods and findings within the context of this literature, and write a coherent text or narrative incorporating these qualitative data into an article that makes an important scientific contribution to the published literature. Perhaps such information may provide important guidance for intervention agents and agencies. This article cannot provide more guidance about how to complete such a report.

Researchers planning ethnographic projects in the future will need to be more efficient in the use of limited financial resources. The technological advances for organizing and storing and retrieving data described above can help in this regard. Although the structured qualitative research approach has been useful in managing the mountains of words generated by our projects, we recognize that many other researchers have also been successful in accomplishing the major functions of planning, collecting, storing, and organizing qualitative analysis. Many have used other ethnographic programs, including Ethnograph, Atlas, Nudist, etc. Our experience has been that these programs have severe limitations for retrieving appropriate materials from a large quantity of words collected from respondents. Yet they may be very appropriate for specific types of analysis that ethnographers conduct. Indeed, a variety of other approaches for integrating qualitative and quantitative data analysis are available ( MacMillan and Koenig 2004 ; Mangabeira, Lee and Fielding 2004 ; Miles and Huberman 1994 ).

A true relational data base such as FileMaker Pro, which we prefer, has a few drawbacks. The average social scientist will need to master it effectively or have the support of an experienced database programmer to create the appropriate FileMaker Pro database structure and create special reports as needed. Its capabilities are more successfully exploited when operating in a well-networked environment (like a university or major research institution) where well-trained database staff can assist. Nevertheless, the investigators and analysts need to invest a substantial amount of time learning how to use this program efficiently and effectively to conduct both the qualitative and semi-quantitative data analysis described above. Outside of the United States, investigators may also find that the procedures outlined above may prove useful in planning to conduct ethnographic research. The authors would be pleased to provide further elaboration about some of the issues addressed above, and can be contacted at the e-mail address above.

Acknowledgments

Preparation of this paper was supported by grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (R01 DA021783-03, 1R01 DA13690-05, R01 DA009056-12, 5T32 DA07233-24), and by National Development and Research Institutes. Points of view, opinions, and conclusions in this paper do not necessarily represent the official position of the U.S. Government or National Development and Research Institutes. The authors acknowledge with appreciation the many contributions to this research by Lawrence Duncan, Stanley Hoogerwerf, Joseph Kotarba, Edward Morse, Gwangi Richardson-Alston, Claudia Jenkins, and Vicki Zaleski.

1 The specific projects reported below, and all prior research, have been carefully reviewed by the institutional review board; further all persons participating as research subjects have given their informed consent prior to interview and are compensated for their information and time.

2 Active drug users and/or persons in recovery often lack many essential skills, have difficulty mastering the skill of writing rich field notes, and often leave before the project ends.

3 This paper receipt worked in all prior projects conducted in NYC. But paper receipts for field expenses are now giving way to similar electronic filing and documentation.

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Ream Geoffrey, Johnson Bruce D, Sifaneck Stephen, Dunlap Eloise. Distinguishing blunts users from joints users: A comparison of marijuana use subcultures. In: Cole Spencer., editor. Street Drugs: New Research. Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science Publishers; 2006. pp. 245–273. [ Google Scholar ]
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FYS: From Sagan to the Green Bros.: An Intro to Science Communication (Amick)

Finding Materials
Search Tips
Citation and Plagiarism
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
SIFT: Information Evaluation
BEAM: How to Use Sources
Anatomy of an Article

Additional Resources

Anatomy of a Scholarly Article This interactive page explains the different sections that are often present with scholarly/academic articles.
Guide on the Side: Reading Scholarly Articles An excellent step-by-step interactive guide hosted by Indiana University.
How to Read a Journal Article How you should read journal articles and when you should look an article structurally (big picture) versus closely (nitty-gritty). By Frederique Laubepin, Ph.D., Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, University of Michigan (2013)
CLIP Tutorial: Popular and Scholarly Sources This chart explains the differences between popular and scholarly sources.

How To Read a Scholarly Journal Article

This video excels at describing and highlighting the anatomy of scholarly articles and their value to readers.

Things to Consider When Reading a Scholarly Article

Consider the following points when reading a scholarly article:

Know your research question or argument. Though your question/argument may change or evolve as you delve deeper into the research process, you will want to have a solid idea of your research focus.
You don't have to read the entire article in order. Start with the abstract which will give you a general summary of the article. If the abstract seems relevant then move to the conclusion or discussion section of the article to gain a better understanding of the article's main claims. At this point if the article does not seem relevant or useful then discard it. However, if the article does seem useful then spend as much time as necessary reading the article.
Read critically. What is the author's argument? You will need to use your judgment when evaluating each source of information. Further research may be necessary if you find the author to be biased or you do not believe the validity of their argument.
Read the reference section. Reading the references or works cited may lead you to other useful resources. You might also get a better understanding of the major players in the area you are researching.
Take notes. How you do this is up to you. Make sure you keep your research question and argument in mind so you can be more efficient when taking notes.

http://libguides.csuchico.edu/c.php?g=462359&p=3163509

Learn more: Scholarly versus Popular Articles

Scholarly, Trade, & Popular Articles from PALNI on Vimeo .

Academic Article Layout

An abstract is a summary of the main article. An abstract will include information about why the research study was done, what the methodology was and something about the findings of the author(s). The abstract is always at the beginning of the article and will either be labeled "abstract" or will be set apart from the rest of the article by a different font or margins.

The abstract should tell you what the research study is about, how the research was done (methodology), who the research sample was, what the authors found and why this is important to the field.

Introduction

Most articles will start with an introductory section, which may be labeled introduction. This section introduces the research study, the thesis statement and why the research being conducted is important.

Questions to ask while you read:

What is the thesis? What are the authors trying to prove or disprove?
What is the contribution that the authors are making to the field?

Literature Review

The literature review section of an article is a summary or analysis of all the research the author read before doing his/her own research. This section may be part of the introduction or in a section called Background. It provides the background on who has done related research, what that research has or has not uncovered and how the current research contributes to the conversation on the topic. When you read the lit review ask:

Does the review of the literature logically lead up to the research questions?
Do the authors review articles relevant to their research study?
Do the authors show where there are gaps in the literature?

The lit review is also a good place to find other sources you may want to read on this topic to help you get the bigger picture.

Methodology

The methodology section or methods section tells you how the author(s) went about doing their research. It should let you know a) what method they used to gather data (survey, interviews, experiments, etc.), why they chose this method, and what the limitations are to this method.

The methodology section should be detailed enough that another researcher could replicate the study described. When you read the methodology or methods section:

What kind of research method did the authors use? Is it an appropriate method for the type of study they are conducting?
How did the authors get their tests subjects? What criteria did they use?
What are the contexts of the study that may have affected the results (e.g. environmental conditions, lab conditions, timing questions, etc.)
Is the sample size representative of the larger population (i.e., was it big enough?)
Are the data collection instruments and procedures likely to have measured all the important characteristics with reasonable accuracy?
Does the data analysis appear to have been done with care, and were appropriate analytical techniques used?

A good researcher will always let you know about the limitations of his or her research.

The results section in a scholarly article is where the author(s) talk about what they found in their research study. Most scholarly articles will have a section labeled results or findings.

Research articles are full of data . The data should be complete and directly support the conclusions the authors' draw about their research question.

Tables, graphs, and charts are good indicators that this is a research article. The tables should represent the data in a clear and readable manner.

The discussion section is where the author(s) write about what they found and what they think it means. The authors may also draw some conclusions about the research and what significance it has in this section. This section will also tell you what some of the issues were with the research or using a specific population for a research study.

The final section is usually called the conclusion or recommendations. Here is where the authors summarize what they found, why they think their research is significant and, if appropriate, make recommendations about future actions or future research that needs to be conducted. In some cases, the conclusion is part of the discussion section.

At the end of a scholarly article, you will find a list of the works cited by the author(s). This list is called a reference list, works cited or bibliography. In scholarly articles, this list will generally be quite long and include articles, books, and other sources.

When you look at the references, take a look at the dates of the articles and books listed. Are they recent? Does this list include both historic and current articles? If you know something about the topic, do you recognize any of the authors listed?

Scholarly vs Popular

Chart details popular and scholarly article differences. For popular articles, journalists or professional writers are the authors. They are written for the general public and often include color, photos, and advertisements. They tend to be short and are written so the average reader can understand them. They give broad overviews of issues that the public cares about, and they rarely cite their sources. They are recommended for general reading, finding topic ideas, and learning basics or perspectives for your topic. Scholarly articles are written by scholars, faculty members, researchers, or professionals in the field. They are written for other scholars or professionals, so they use a lot of technical jargon and academic language. They are mostly text with perhaps a few charts or graphs. They tend to be lengthy and cover narrow topics related to specific fields. They include full citations for many credible sources. Scholarly articles are recommended as sources for academic work or professional development. They also help you learn about new research being conducted in a given field of study.

Scholarly & Popular Articles by adstarkel . Used under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

How to Tell if a Source is Scholarly/Academic

How to tell if a source is scholarly or academic. First, look for the easy stuff: it should be on the long side, it will be very text-heavy with rare color and or advertisements. Scholarly sources often start with an abstract and finish with a reference list. You can also look at the author to see if a source is scholarly; are they credible with education or experience with the topic? Are they affiliated with a university or organization? Is there more than one author? The source should include its source and cite them in-text and in references. The purpose of scholarly sources is to be academic and informational. They should remain objective and cover specific, narrow topics. Scholarly articles also often introduce new research. Finally, the language of an article can indicate whether or not it is scholarly. Scholarly articles use technical jargon and don't stop to give definitions. They are meant for an audience of academics or professionals, so it's often hard for someone outside the field of study to understand them.

How to tell if a Source is Scholarly/Academic by adstarkel . Used under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Finding Scholarly/Academic Articles

To locate scholarly/academic articles, your best bet is to look in one of our databases or use WorldCat Discovery and limit your search to articles. You will likely find that there are LOTS of popular sources in with the academic ones, even within our databases. Use the Peer-Review Limiter to your advantage. This option is normally located in the left column; you can see screenshots of this option from WorldCat Discovery (left) and our EBSCO databases (right).

This will limit your search to publications that are most scholarly/academic. It does not necessarily filter to include publications that go through a strict peer-review process. It also does not apply the filter at the article level; occasionally it will allows articles that are not scholarly/academic to come through (for example, an editorial opinion piece can be published in a scholarly journal but the article itself is not scholarly).

If you have questions about whether or not a source is scholarly/academic, ask your professor or a librarian!

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Organizing Papers and References without Losing your Mind
As a follow up, here are a few tips on how to keep track of the papers you want to read without losing your mind. Choose a reference manager. Sure, you can get by creating a poster or two without a reference manager, but it's incredibly risky to cite references by hand for manuscripts and grant proposals. Choosing and using a reference ...
15 Best Free Web Tools to Organize Your Research
Zotero: Collect, manage, and cite your research sources. Lets you organize data into collections and search through them by adding tags to every source. This is a computer program, but there's a browser extension that helps you send data to it. Google Scholar: A simple way to search for scholarly literature on any subject. Diigo: Collect, share ...
How to Organize Research Papers: A Cheat Sheet for Graduate Students
To organize notes and articles, assign different colors to each sub-topic and use highlighters, tabs, or font colors. Organize your literature chronologically: Even in a short period of time, you might have missed overarching themes or arguments if you hadn't read them previously. It's best to organize your research papers chronologically.
Effectively Organize your Research Articles on your System
Brief Overview of the Article. Steps to Organize Research Articles on Desktop. Create a Folder Structure. Use File Naming Conventions. Utilize Metadata and Tags. Backup and Sync Files. Tips for Keeping Research Articles Organized. Use a Reference Management Software. Regularly Review and Update Folder Structure.
Organizing your research: A scientist's tips for journalists
Below is a list of tips and tools that Gosztyla shared during the panel. 1. Find related research with literature mapping tools. When journalists report on a new study, it's important to consider where that study fits into the larger body of research. Pubmed and Google Scholar are go-to research platforms to find academic research.
My favorite tools for managing, organizing, and reading research papers
1. ArXiv Sanity Preserver. I use Arxiv Sanity Preserver to literally preserve my sanity when handling research papers on ArXiv. A site created by Andrej Karpathy, Arxiv Sanity Preserves, is a web interface to help you find your favorite papers and what is trending in the field.The site provides you with a search engine to find papers on any topic. You can then save your favorite papers in your ...
How to find, read and organize papers
Whichever tool you choose, the key is to create a table that details all the papers you read. This should include the status of the paper (for instance, whether you've read it) and which ...
How to Search and Organize Research Articles
Organizing Research Papers. Different people find different ways to organize research articles. Some prefer to print everything out and put them in binders, some prefer to read the digital versions and sort them in folders. Personally, I like to read on a computer screen and sort research papers by project.
Work hack: How to organize your research literature
A must-have strategy for fieldwork. The amount of literature researchers are expected to stay abreast of can be overwhelming so it's vital to have a system that allows documents and images to be ...
Organizing Your Research
Good research involves running multiple searches of multiple databases and sorting through large numbers of books and articles. To avoid unnecessarily retracing your steps, figure out a system in advance to track what databases you've checked and what searches you've run and to record and organize useful sources.
Research Guides: Literature Reviews: 4. Organizing Your Research
As you progress in your research and start to collect relevant books, articles, and more, you may want to use a citation and research management tool to help you organize your research. The Hunt Library provides access to an institutional subscription to RefWorks, but there are also other free tools available.
How to Organize Research in 2025 [Notes, PDFs, Docs, Tabs]
In this article, I wanted to take the opportunity to explain what I believe is the best way to organize research.My goal is to cover research in general (e.g. blogging, academic research, thought leadership) - anything relating to a ton of notes, PDFs, docs, and tabs.In writing this, I tried to take into account pricing (don't worry, the system I will explain is 100% free), devices, and ...
How to organize research articles
Looking for a better way to organize research articles in 2022? This video covers how to organize research articles with super easy tips that you can apply t...
How to Organize Research: Notes, PDF Files, & Documents
1. Note-taking and Mind mapping - How to Hack Your Mind. First, start by organizing your notes into categories. You can do this on a sticky note or on a mind map. Even though you may feel like a middle school kid using colorful sticky paper, sticky notes are proven to be one of the most effective ways to organize research.
Three Tips to Organize Thesis and Article Sources
4 Must-Have Tools to Find and Organize Research Articles for a Literature Review | A video with tips on using Elicit, Research Rabbit, Notion, and Zotero together to gather and organize your research. 15 Best Free Web Tools to Organize Your Research | Broken into two lists of web tools: one for research and study and the second for writing. How ...
How to Organize and Save Your Research
How to Save Articles in EBSCOhost or Library OneSearch. Open the database and click on the Sign In link near the top right corner of your screen. If you haven't already set up an account, click on Create a New Account. If you have already created an account and are signed in, click on Folder to access previously saved material.
9 Organizing Research: Taking and Keeping Effective Notes
When you have the time to sit down and begin taking notes on your primary sources, you can annotate your photos in Tropy. Alternatively, OneNote, which is cloud-based, can serve as a way to organize your research. OneNote allows you to create separate "Notebooks" for various projects, but this doesn't preclude you from searching for terms or tags across projects if the need ever arises.
A Beginner's Guide to Starting the Research Process
Step 4: Create a research design. The research design is a practical framework for answering your research questions. It involves making decisions about the type of data you need, the methods you'll use to collect and analyze it, and the location and timescale of your research. There are often many possible paths you can take to answering ...
3 Free Tools to Organize YourResearch Papers
There is so much literature for you to go through when you are a researcher. However, reading hundreds of research papers is not as helpful as organizing the...
What's the best way to organize my research?
Step 1: Reading. Research is all about reading, reading and more reading. As Isaac Newton reminds us, to see further than others, one needs to stand on the shoulder of giants. However, in order to do so, one first needs to understand the work of those giants in order to stand on their shoulders. Understanding the research field is of paramount ...
Organize / Take Notes
Focus on the information in the article that is relevant to your research question (you may be able to skim over other parts). Think critically about what you read and build your argument based on it. ... It may have struck you that you just read a lot of "re" words: re-read, re-organize, re-group, re-shuffle, re-think. That's right; working ...
How to keep your research projects organized: folder structure
All researchers are familiar with the importance of delivering a paper that is written in a clean and organized way. However, the same thing can often not be said about the way that we organize and maintain the code and data used in the backend (i.e. code and data layer) of a research project.
Structured Qualitative Research: Organizing "Mountains of Words" for
At every step of conducting research using qualitative methods, researchers and research teams face daunting problems of how to organize, collect, manage, store, retrieve, analyze, and give meaning to the information obtained during qualitative research. This article focuses upon strategies and experiences of the authors, who have conducted a ...
How to Organize Research Articles Using Notion
Organize your literature or journal articles in Notion. Be able to manage journal articles, choose when to read them and what topics they fall into, and easi...
Anatomy of an Article
The literature review section of an article is a summary or analysis of all the research the author read before doing his/her own research.This section may be part of the introduction or in a section called Background. It provides the background on who has done related research, what that research has or has not uncovered and how the current research contributes to the conversation on the topic.

15 Best Free Web Tools to Organize Your Research

Research and Study

Writing Tools

How to Organize Research Papers: A Cheat Sheet for Graduate Students

Before you start

Research with your final product in mind

When you find useful information.

File renaming

Use keywords wisely

Create annotations

Write your own notes

When you are ready to write

Write down ideas as they come to you

My toolbox to organize research papers

Aruna Kumarasiri

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1. Find related research with literature mapping tools.

2. Stay on top of current research with RSS feeds.

3. Use research management software to file your research.

4. Routinely read your research pile.

5. Don’t forget to take notes while reading documents .

6. You have collected. You have read. Now organize your work in a database.

7. Go one step further with automation tools.

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How to Search and Organize Research Articles

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