BIOL 418: Genetic Analysis in Medicine (McDougal)

You will encounter many articles, data sources, and other materials throughout your research in this course and beyond. There are numerous ways you can choose to stay organized, but they will all have similar benefits. Having an organized research process will....

• Prevent you from repeating or duplicating your prior work
• Prevent you from having to re-read articles multiple times to remember how they fit in to your project
• Help you identify which articles different pieces of information came from so you can cite them appropriately
• Help you from a librarian or from your peers more effectively
• Help you locate and reuse materials in future projects

Everyone organizes their research process differently. This is a good thing -- your research process and organization should be personal and make sense to you. Here are a few tips / areas of consideration:

• Search strategies: I recommend documenting your search strategies -- where did you look, which search terms did you use, what did you find, etc.? Keeping an informal record or search log of your process will prevent you from inadvertently duplicating your efforts throughout your project.
• Article storage: Whether you prefer to collect permalinks, save PDFs, or print articles, you should consider how to organize and store them effectively. You may wish to store them in folders (electronic or physical) based on topic area.
• Note-taking: Highlighting and annotating articles has numerous benefits, including improving your reading comprehension and making it easier to find key details that you want to cite later on. You may also want to take general notes about your research process and the ideas that you generate as you begin sifting through articles.
• Research data management: If you are collecting data for your research, it is helpful to come up with a data management plan. Sometimes it's required as a condition of a grant. In this plan, you should consider how you will collect data, how you will store it, how you will analyze, and how you may share it with researchers in your lab or the broader scientific community.
• Resource sharing: If you are working on a project with several other researchers, consider how you can share information with each other effectively. It is useful to discuss how you plan to collect and store information early in your project for consistency. You may also consider how you wish to share the end product of your research with the broader scientific community. That could take the form of a published article, but you may also consider making your associated data publicly available in a repository.
• Citations: Keeping track of citation information for resources you plan to incorporate into your research can save you a lot of time at the end of your project when it comes time to cite them in your paper. I recommend using a citation manager such as Mendeley, EndNote, or Zotero.

Citation managers are great tools for keeping your research organized. You can use them to keep track of references you want to cite in your paper, share resources with your peers, and automatically generate citations for you. These tools can streamline your research process and save you a lot of time. However, make sure you double check any automatically generated citations for accuracy -- they can sometimes have minor errors.