The Bedford Researcher Chapter 6: Summary and Discussion

Palmquist discusses information management and sources in chapter six of The Bedford Researcher.  Chapter four dealt with the subject of sources but chapter six goes into more detail about how to manage sources, notes, and citations. Palmquist provides tips on how to save and organize information for later access, as well as time saving recommendations: bookmarking web pages, recording dates on hard copies of articles, including citations on printed materials, etc. Email is also a great way to keep track of source locations. The text reviews note-taking in further detail and underscores the importance of sticking to one type of note-taking method.

This chapter was really useful and complements this week's lecture nicely. I do not normally take separate notes on the side while reading an article but, after having moved my comments from the article margins to notebook paper, I've found that it allows me to have a much more organized format where I can scan the highlights quickly. I've also found that summarizing the main points of a given source on separate notebook paper is really helpful. My writing topic references a lot of specific U.S. Supreme Court rulings so I have used Wikipedia as a starting point for many of the cases and recorded the summary of the court findings in my notes. While reading through some of the scholarly articles that may be useful to me, I've found that a couple of them are a little dense and discuss details of other rulings at length. My strategy has been to read my notes on the cases cited in a given article, review one or two periodicals about those particular cases, and then approach the scholarly article with a better understanding of the issue.