UW Collegiate and Local High School Classes

Writing a research paper can be difficult and frustrating if you don’t keep your sources organized. Here’s some advice to keep your readings, notes, and bibliographies organized so you don’t run into trouble later.

• Create a separate folder on your computer for each research project you’re working on.
• Place all your full-text articles (PDFs) in this folder.
• Create a complete bibliography entry for each of your sources (including books and other non-digital sources) and save the file to this folder.
• As you read your sources, take notes under the bibliography entry. Be sure to note the page numbers as appropriate

When it comes time to put these ideas together into a first draft of your paper, it will be easy to see which ideas came from which source. This will make writing a lot easier, but also help you to see how your sources agree or disagree on your topic, and make sure you avoid accidentally plagiarizing any of your sources.