Organising the notes and articles a search produces
A search leaves notes, saved web pages and downloaded articles behind, and they serve the writing only if each stays attached to its source and can be found again. That takes notes that carry their sources, tools that save and retrieve web finds and notes, files named and foldered by a consistent scheme, and a personal article library that is scanned, stored, backed up, indexed and read on screen. A large body of discordant material, such as years of interviews, can be organised with a timeline and software of the same kinds.
Keeping notes attached to their sources
The facts a draft will present are needed at hand when writing begins, and in the end the writer needs to know the source of each figure. A writer without the necessary data at hand breaks their train of creative thought, an interlude that could result in disconnected prose.
How notes are saved and organised is personal, and the method is very likely to change over time. Each paper note, whether a photocopied article or book page or a printed abstract, should carry the detailed identification of its source; for photocopied book pages, a slip naming the source can be taped so that it is copied onto each page. One author holds that the full citation on every note page helps avoid later confusion about the source of ideas and phrases, and that notes made without careful attribution make it much too easy to become an accidental plagiarist.
Ideas that come at any time can go into the notes too. They can be kept on paper or in a word-processor document arranged by chapter, and pasted into the first draft when work on that chapter begins, which avoids retyping.
Notes should be assembled expansively, because what seems not pertinent today may prove useful later. More than half of them will probably go unused, at least in the current project, and that is perfectly acceptable: assembling them helps clarify the writer's thinking and may suggest another paper, and once the project is complete the unused notes can be discarded or saved for another one.
Saving web finds and notes electronically
Web pages found while searching can be kept in an online organisational tool, and two such tools in 2008 show two designs. One saved results in the familiar folder format and also let them be tagged. Sites and pictures could be saved with comments, to jog the memory or to share with friends or colleagues. The saved folders could be searched, and browser favourites could be imported so that they could be reached from any computer. It worked without registering, but registering made the saved material reachable from any computer.
The other was a social bookmarking service, which stored saved sites on the web rather than in the browser. Each site was saved under one-word tags, either recommended or made up, and because the tags were stored on the web, anyone searching a tag found the sites saved under it and how many people had saved each. The two differed in how open they were to the community and in how they retrieved search results. On the folder service sharing took an active choice to share, and on the social service an active choice not to. Folders were faster for retrieving information specific to a topic, while tags were cumbersome for rapid retrieval unless the user applied them very accurately, though they could cast the net widely in a search.
An electronic note-taking tool such as Evernote may help a writer who amasses half-used notebooks and scraps of paper. It can be used like a traditional notebook, whenever inspiration strikes, without later transcribing handwritten notes onto the computer. Notes are written and saved on a computer, phone or tablet and can be synchronised across them. Attachments, images and video can be added and PDFs and audio files dragged in, and a web clipper extension saves material from any website, which is much less fiddly than gluing cuttings into a notebook. Notes can be organised into notebooks and tagged to aid searching.
Evernote stores its material online rather than on the computer's hard drive. That gives portability, in theory from anywhere, and lets a notebook be shared with someone who does not have the application installed, if they have read-only permission. Security is paramount for anything stored online, and by 2014 Evernote had had a well-publicised security breach. In 2014 its basic version was free and allowed up to 2 GB a month, a limit most users were unlikely to reach, and a Premium version was available by monthly subscription.
A personal article library
A relatively inexpensive system for scanning, storing, backing up, retrieving and viewing documents can replace file cabinets and shelves with easy-to-retrieve electronic copies. One such system was built to convert a retired professor's lifetime collection of about 6,000 articles and book chapters, some of them very difficult to replace if lost, from a large bank of file cabinets onto a single recordable DVD, and then to dispose of the paper.
The system is summarised as ten rules:
- Do not keep paper copies of any downloaded document.
- Endeavour to start converting all paper documents to PDF.
- Adopt a standard approach to naming PDF files.
- Store them in an organised fashion in suitably named folders on your own computer.
- Back those folders up regularly by synchronising with a portable hard drive, and then onto every computer you use at work or at home.
- Index your hard drive with a program that can search inside PDFs.
- Seldom print.
- View the files on large monitors or on a multi-monitor system.
- Send PDF documents by email rather than by fax or post.
- Encourage others to be virtually paperless at work and at home.
Where an article's PDF can be downloaded, its quality is generally better than a self-made scan, with exceptions, and it is generally searchable and needs no further manipulation. In 2008 most journals offered PDFs only for the preceding decade or so, with notable exceptions.
Where no PDF is available, the paper has to be scanned. By 2008 inexpensive sheet-fed scanners could scan a multi-page document at fifteen or more sheets a minute, capturing both sides of each sheet at once and producing a PDF on the computer. One such compact model cost under $500 and came bundled with software that converts the scanned images to searchable text and lets the user annotate the article. A paper too big for the scanner is a problem, because large-format sheet-fed scanners are too expensive for a single user. It can be reduced on a photocopier and then scanned, or cut to size and scanned in pieces; a guillotine-style paper cutter is very useful to keep the edges straight, though a pair of scissors can suffice.
By default the scanner's software names each PDF by the date and time it was produced, and the name should be changed to a more descriptive one. One convention names the file by title, first author, journal and year, as in CreatingPaperlessOffice CITROME IJCP2008, or by keywords in place of the title, and places it in a suitably named folder, such as Computers and Psychiatry. Whatever the scheme, it should be applied consistently and spelled correctly, so that files can be retrieved accurately later. Spaces between words and upper or lower case are optional, but they may make a list of file names easier to review.
A downloaded native PDF can be quite compact, while a scanned one can run to several megabytes, and scanned documents collectively can take a relatively large amount of disc space. Scanning in black and white manages that, and as a side benefit makes the text darker and crisper and the documents load much faster. Colour scanning can be reserved for illustrations that do not reproduce well in monochrome. In 2008 a hard drive larger than 40 gigabytes was generally needed to start storing scanned documents, and compact external drives of 80 gigabytes or more cost under $100 and generally drew their power from the computer over the USB cable.
Backing up is essential, and software makes incremental back-ups quick and easy. The key concept is synchronisation, which keeps the same folders and identical files on each computer and external drive, using a synchronisation program such as SyncToy, free for Windows. The folders are first copied to the external drive. When new documents have been scanned or downloaded to one computer, that computer is periodically synchronised with the drive, which takes a few seconds or minutes, and the drive is then synchronised with each other computer, such as a laptop, so that every machine and the drive hold the same updated folders. If one machine fails, nothing is lost.
Even the best naming scheme is less than adequate once a few hundred files are stored, and the file search built into Windows is not sufficient either. Free programs such as Google Desktop and Copernic Desktop Search index the entire hard drive, and the latter searches inside PDFs as well as word-processor documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and emails and their attachments. A file whose details are not remembered can then be found by entering some of the words, dates or names it may contain. The program returns a list of possible files, sorted as the user specifies, such as by date, name or file format, with a preview so the file does not have to be opened.
Viewing a PDF while doing other tasks on the same monitor is possible, but a dual-monitor setup is far more efficient. In 2008, 19-inch flat-screen monitors cost about $300, most operating systems supported dual monitors, and a second monitor needed a dual-output video card, an additional video card or an external USB video adapter. The alternative is a somewhat more expensive, larger monitor whose maximum resolution the computer's video card supports.
By 2008 document management could be essentially paperless, freeing shelf and cabinet space while permitting fast and easy retrieval and the viewing of documents at several locations, and the substantial fall in the cost of scanning equipment and hard drives had made an inexpensive system a reality. A journal file library can be the first step towards a paperless office.
A large, discordant body of material
A family memoir drew on nine surviving relatives and eight of their children, on oral history interviews gathered over many years, on research into the Jewish culture and traditions of Eastern European villages and into the history of the Holocaust, and on source documents searched out for each person. Many of the interviews' accounts of paths and experiences during the war were quite different.
Two tools carried the organisation. The first was a detailed timeline that recorded not only events, such as births, marriages, deaths, concentration camps and immigration, but also each person's age at the time. A separate line for each person made relationships easier to identify and helped in understanding the family dynamics. The writer judged superimposing the family's events on the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's historical timelines needlessly cumbersome, adding little.
The second was software. Plain transcription of the audio tapes quickly gave way to Transana, a program for managing and analysing large collections of media data, for transcribing the oral history interviews. It made a searchable database of video clips by person and keyword, let emotions and nonverbal cues seen in the videos be annotated in the transcripts, and let time stamps be inserted. The writer did not find iMovie as readily searchable for clips on specific topics. Transana might suit writing about heated exchanges at medical conferences or debates, because it allows gestures and nonverbal behaviour to be analysed better.
Zotero organised the genealogical details and tracked the source documents for each person, while Evernote proved harder to organise and felt like a large junk pile. Scrivener organised the information and drafts. Each major family member had a folder, with subfolders by period: childhood, prelude to war, the war years, liberation, coming to America and later years. Transcribed passages went into them with their time stamps, and each bit of information was annotated with its source. The annotation was sometimes handy where memories diverged, and the writer felt it critical to keep the sources verifiable in case of any challenge from Holocaust deniers.
| Tool | Best use | Cost | Ease of use | Aids |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zotero | Importing articles and bibliographic information while browsing; searching stored facts and bits of information reused across articles; sorting bibliographies into collections tagged with keywords | Free | Easy | Tutorial |
| Scrivener | Writing and rewriting; writing that requires many citations or refers to source documents; importing articles without bibliographic data | $49 after a 30-day free trial | Moderate | Tutorial and videos |
| Transana | Analysis: adding codes and building a database of video clips; inserting time stamps into transcripts | $150 | Difficult | Tutorial and demonstrations |
The same writer's medical writing involves gathering and reviewing scientific publications and news reports, dissecting and analysing the details, and reframing the story for a specific audience. Zotero and Scrivener have served her for years in that work. She finds Zotero helpful for annotating references, searching by keyword and collecting small facts reusable across articles, such as details about specific infections that change little over time. Zotero and Scrivener adapt to the level of detail a writer wants to organise, and Scrivener includes several formats for different writing styles. For her, both helped organise the writing and ensure the accuracy of its content, and Scrivener also made the writing more efficient.