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Managing Your Sources: Digital Notebooks

Learn how digital notebooks, an annotated bibliography, or source evaluation tables can enable critical analysis and keep you organised when researching.

Using digital notebooks

Have you ever felt overwhelmed when trying to start an essay because your notes are scattered across two paper notebooks and three different apps...and you can't find the link to a really important article you read...and you can't remember what is where, and down feels like up, and you want to give up before you've even started?

We can't promise that maintaining digital notebooks will magically solve all of this, but this method of managing academic sources has many advantages. For example, you can...

  • Create one notebook per module or per major project, all of which you can access from one site;
  • Use features like highlighting, tagging, and keyword searching to label and locate important information;
  • Use customization options to structure and colour-code notebook sections in ways that are intuitive to you;
  • Embed links to the articles you read to prevent misplacing or losing your sources;
  • Add pages for your mind map, essay plan, to-do list, etc., making these easy to update alongside your notes.

Many digital notebook apps exist, including Microsoft OneNote. OneNote is free to Southampton students, and it works seamlessly with other 365 apps you might already use such as To Do, Loop, etc. If you haven't maintained digital notebooks in the past but want to give it a shot, OneNote is a great starting place.

The video below walks you through how to get started and includes tips to customize your digital notebooks to support more efficient writing.