 You are clear for launch, and with that shut down your visors, O2 on and prepare for ignition to O2. You can copy that and um. Hey there, it's Mr. Ruchoff. In our last lesson, we learned how to find all sorts of great sources. And this lesson, what we're going to do is we're going to show you how you can manage the information you get from these sources. This lesson should help you avoid two frustrating things that can happen while doing your research paper. First, we don't want you to find yourself in the position where you know that killer quota or that great statistic. But when you get ready to write your paper, you can't find where it is. The second thing we want you to avoid is when you do find that killer quota statistic, when you go to write, you find out you don't have the information you need to be able to cite your source in your paper. These things happen and it used to happen to me a lot. But if you have a system for managing your sources, they won't happen to you. Now we're going to touch on five different ways you can manage your notes over your sources and your citations. We're going to talk about taking it on a notebook paper, do using note cards and annotative bibliography as a digital spreadsheet and purpose-built software. Now some are better than others but you'll have to determine what works best for you. Now regardless of the method you use, before you start your research, I encourage you to make an initial outline or a mind map that breaks your research down into different categories. Not only does this help direct what you need to hunt for but it's very useful in sorting out the information once you find it. Essentially what we're going to do is you're going to use these topics as buckets where we can throw our research. So a study that shows that homework, racist test scores in high school would be tagged to go into this bucket while one that shows that extension homework is best for math would go into this bucket. You can also assign these topics and subtypes a different color. This will help you be able to sort your information visually later on. Another tip I would recommend is organizing your digital files. Make a separate folder in your hard drive or Google Drive based upon the topics or subtopics you have. In Google Drive you can even color code your folders to the corresponding colors we've chosen for our topics. All you need to do is right click on a folder and select choose color. So we have organized our files but we really haven't done anything yet to organize our pieces of information. Let's talk about how we're going to do that. Now the first method is one you've probably already been using, the notebook. And there's advantages using a notebook. First of all, it's something you're already used to in your other classes, you have the materials and you can take notes over your sources anywhere. However, after you have the information your notes is difficult to arrange the information in a sequence to be able to help you during the writing process or be able to easily insert the text into your paper. And if you do not have a system for how to take your notes it can be difficult to find a piece of information without laboriously going back over all your notes. Fortunately there are some things you can do to help organize the information. First of all, make sure that you keep all of your notes in the same notebook as possible. This is to minimize the risk of having an important note misplaced. Second, before you take any notes write the full reference citation for the source. This way you'll have all the information you need to be able to complete the reference or the work cited pager once you begin writing your paper. Remember as we outlined in our last lesson many databases such as Google Scholar will provide a citation for you. The citation will also serve as a header for all the information that you're gonna record from your sources in your notes. Now third, read the entire article first before you're taking notes but you should highlight and annotate anything that's interesting from the article which is probably what you're gonna layer or put into your notes. And fourth, when you've completed reading the source below the citation write a short description of what the overall thrust of the article is. Now if the source is advocating a particular position or has a bias, note that as well. That way you'll be able to provide context information in your paper should you use that source. Now fifth, go back through the article and begin taking notes over those elements that you have highlighted or made annotation notes about. Be sure to use quotation marks for that information that is directly quoted. That way when you go to write your paper you know what was directly quoted and what was paraphrased. By the way, it is nearly always better to paraphrase your information instead of using a direct quote. Now sixth, write an in-text citation for each entry included in the page number. That way when you use your information in your text you already have the in-text citation ready and you just copy it down in your paper. Seventh, off to the side of your individual note write the topic and subtitle it from your initial outline that this information addresses. Then with a highlighter mark the color of the topic. This will allow you later to quickly thumb through your notes and then be able to find information you need when you're writing your draft. Another tip, if you have more topics and highlighter colors you can create color combinations such as the main topic of one color and a subtopic in another. When you're done researching and begin putting your paper together you can quickly now look for the colors that relate to the particular paragraph you're writing and find what you need to be able to properly cite that source. Now the next method is the note card method. This is actually how I learned to write research papers when I was in high school. You'll use a combination of three by five cards and five by seven cards. The three by five cards will be your source cards and this is where you're gonna write your reference information for your work cited or your reference page. Now below that you're gonna write a short summary just like we did in the notebook example. Now each of your source cards will have its own number which you will write in the top left corner. So in the corner of your first source you write the number one on your second source you write number two and so on. The five by seven cards are your data cards where you're gonna be able to write all your facts. On each card you will write one element of information that you receive from your source. On the top left corner of these cards write the source number from the corresponding source card. So if you have four pieces from the same source you're gonna have four or five by seven cards with the same source number. On the bottom right of the card write the index citation along with the page number and then at the top right corner write the topic and subtopic and color the topics with a highlighter. Now the biggest disadvantage of this system is you might come up with 50 more cards for a long research paper which increases your chances of losing a card. Now you can use a large binder clip to keep all your cards together. I didn't even see people use Ziploc bags. However, I'd recommend getting a card box. You can get them from Amazon for about $5. They're about the best way I've seen to be able to keep all your note cards in one place. The advantage of using the system is that it provides you a way to physically arrange your paper's evidence as you may use it in your paper. First take all your data cards and sort them by topic and subtopic making a pile for each. Now each of these piles will likely become either a paragraph or a section in your paper. Then you'll physically create a revised outline by moving the piles and then the individual pieces of evidence in order that you think that makes best sense. For many people the ability to physically move the information around really helps them think through the structure of your paper. And if you're one of these people that this works for, you might look at the note card system to see if it works for you. Then we have the third method which is the annotated bibliography. Now an annotated bibliography is often assigned as part of a research paper by a teacher or professor. As an assignment, it is a product in which you will list all the sources you've found in the proper citation format and in alphabetical order. Underneath each citation, you'll write a concise annotation that summarizes the source's main idea, evaluates the authority of the source and determines its intended audience and explains how the source relates to your topic. But we can use this format as a digital notebook. We're gonna do the same thing as we did in a notebook method except we're gonna do it on Google Docs or a Word document. Here's an example. For each source, I provided the citation that serves as my header just like we did it for the notebook method. I'll make my citation jump out by bolding it. Underneath our citation, I've added this short summary about the article just as we've done in our previous two methods. Next, I'm gonna begin listing out the information I feel that it's important that I found from each source but before each one of these notes, I will list the topic and highlight it in the appropriate color. Then just as we've done in our previous methods, you will type in your in-text citation along the page number at the end of the fact note. And just like a no-card method, you can group topics and subtopics into a new document by copying and pasting and then move the groups around in the order you desire. Color coding your topics makes this very easy to do. And since we paraphrase our notes and we've included in-text citations at the end of our fact notes, now you can actually have a skeleton of the paper already built for you, including all your text citations. Additionally, you already have a draft, reference or work cited page. When you're all done writing your paper, delete all the sources from your annotated bibliography if you didn't use and delete the fact notes and you're pretty much left with a reference page for your paper. Now the downside of the system is that unlike a notebook or a note card system, you're gonna need a computer to be able to do so. The next method is the spreadsheet method. And if the annotated bibliography is the digital answer to the notebook method, the spreadsheet method is a digital equivalent to the note card system. And either Excel or Google Sheets make two worksheets. One worksheet you're gonna name sources and the other we're gonna name either facts or data. On the source worksheet, make headings for four columns. Name the columns, source number, references, web address and the last column we're gonna name summary. Now select the columns and change the format to wrap the text and make the reference of and summary columns much wider. Under the source number header, enter one, two and three in the cells below then highlight all of the cells and then click and drag all the way down the column. Now you're gonna see that these cells now have numbers already prepared for you. This web sheet is essentially gonna be kind of like our three by five cards that we used earlier. Here you're gonna enter in the reference citation for each of your sources. Add the website address if one is available and then you're going to have a place to be able to provide a summary for the major thrust of the source. Now let's go to our fact worksheet. The fact worksheet would be kind of like our five by seven data cards we used earlier, we're gonna make headers for the following columns, source number, fact, page number, topic and then subtopic. Format the fact column to wrap text and make the column much wider. In the source number column, you're gonna put the source number corresponding to the source that you entered in the source worksheet. Then you will enter your notes from the source under the fact column into the page number for where your facts came from and the topic and the subtopic. The advantage of this system is you can easily sort your topics into subtopics and instantly group your information just like how we take our three or five by seven cards and made them into a pile in the note card system. Now if you know a little bit about Excel or Google Sheets, we can add a few more features into our workbook. First, what we're gonna do is make another worksheet. We're gonna name it topics. Make two column headers, topics and subtopics. In the topics column, type in all the topics from your mind mapping or your initial outline and then we're gonna do the same thing in your subtopic column. Now go to your fact worksheet, select your topic column and then go to the data section on the menu bar and click on data validation. Ensure that show drop down list is selected and click on the little box icon next to the criteria option. The words select data range will appear when your cursor is over it. Then go to your topic worksheet and highlight the topic column and click save. Do the same thing for your subtopic. This allows you now to select your topics through a drop down list. We can even have it automatically color code these topics if you want. But what you're gonna do is you're gonna select your topic column, select format from the menu bar and then conditional formatting. Under format rules, change the format to text is exactly, type in the first topic in the value window and change the fill color. Make sure you type in the topic exactly as it is in our list and if you do, when you select that topic, it'll acts automatically format into a color so we can be able to see what topics you have. Do this for all the topics in your topic column and do the same thing for the subtopics in your subtopic column. Now, as you enter your information, you don't have to keep typing and highlighting your topics, saving you a bunch of the time. Now, if you wanna take this to the next level, then there's one other feature we can add that's gonna make this so much easier to be able to do. So go to your fact sheet, make a new column and name it in text citations. What we're gonna do is we're gonna use this column to pull over the in text citations from your source sheet using the source number as a key. Below the heading, type equals lookup open parentheses. After the parentheses, take your mouse and then click on this rows source number. This tells the program that we're gonna use this value as the key. Now type in a comma and now go to our source worksheet. Select all the columns from the source column all the way over to the in text column. When they are highlighted, press the comma key. Now count the number of columns from the source number column to the in text citation number and we see the numbers four. So type the number four and add another comma and then type in the word false. Close your parentheses and hit enter. Now click and drag down the first cell for about 200 rows. This copies the function to each of these cells and if you have any entries, you're gonna see the in text citation has been brought over. Now you will see this error message in the cells without source number entries. Don't worry, it will change when you enter the source numbers. Now we'll widen this column and here you go. Whenever you select a source in your fact sheet, you can verify it's the correct source. And one last thing we're gonna do is we want to give ourselves a warning to not type anything into this column. So right click at the top of this column and select protect range. Click on the green box which says protections and then select show warning. Now if you accidentally type something in this column it's not gonna overwrite the function we just put in. Now this method gives you a way to manage and sort your source information digitally. Also, as you've seen, it can be configured any way you want to be able to fit your needs. However, it is a method demands that you use a computer and that can be a drawback. Now the last method we're gonna look at is using special purpose software that is designed to be able to help researchers be able to manage a large number of sources. Now some of these programs are free while some others require a purchase or a subscription. Among the free tools are mentally Zotero, EndNote Basic, although many colleges will actually provide paid tools such as RefWorks and the full version of EndNote. These tools will all have different features. Most provide citation engines to cite your sources in different styles and you can store PDF articles if they're available. Some will allow you to mark and annotate these PDFs and then provide ways to sort and search these annotations. You can also use some of these tools to be able to search for sources. Now while these are great tools, for most students it's gonna be overkill. However, if you're working on your senior or your master's thesis or especially if you're doing a PhD dissertation, they are incredibly useful. But for high school and undergraduate students, I would recommend one of the four methods we've already talked about. All right, we've examined five methods for how you can be able to manage information you gathered during your research. We talked about their advantages, we talked about your disadvantages, but you should be able to pick one that best fits you. Now next time, we'll begin our discussion on how to cite sources. But until then, keep on learning.