Taking Research Notes
- Start a new page of notes for each new source of information.
- Record the bibliographic information for your source at the top of your page, so that you have everything you need for completing your list of works cited when you are finished your paper. Remember, you will need to record different information depending on the type of source you are using (book, film, website, etc.).
- Take notes in point form and in your own words:
- This is the best strategy for avoiding plagiarism
- Do not cut and paste from websites
- Read a short section, look away from the original text and record what you remember in brief, abbreviated point-form
- Only look back at the original to confirm spellings or very specific factual details (e.g. an exact date)
- Use abbreviations, symbols and other shorthand to make note-taking faster and to avoid accidentally copying the original source too closely.
- If you plan to quote a source or want to use a unique phrase within your own writing, copy it down word for word and put it in quotation marks.
- Each time you start taking notes from a new page in a source with page numbers, record the page number in the margin.
- For electronic publications without page numbers, you only need to keep track of the bibliographic information.
- For time-based media sources (e.g. YouTube videos), keep track of the range of hours, minutes and seconds you are referring to in your notes, like so (00:59:12-01:02:27).
- You will need these bibliographic details, page numbers and time stamps properly cite information from your research notes in your paper.
If you are taking notes from a source with page numbers, they should look something like this:
If you are taking notes from a source with NO page numbers, they should look something like this:
If you are taking notes from a time-based source, they should look something like this:
