How to keep research notes you can find again

Every book that leans on facts has the same quiet problem. You read something useful in March, you need it in September, and by then it is somewhere among a notebook, three browser tabs you closed, a photo on your phone and a document called notes final 2. You remember that you read it. You cannot remember where.

This matters most for nonfiction and memoir, where a wrong date or an unsourced quotation is a real problem, and for historical fiction, where readers notice. But any novelist who has looked up how long a letter took to cross the Atlantic, or what a particular bird sounds like, knows the feeling. Here is a way of keeping research that is built around finding things later, which is the only reason to keep them at all.

One place, not five

The single biggest improvement is to choose one home for the book’s research and put everything there, even the things that start somewhere else. A photo of a page becomes a note with the photo’s details typed in. A link becomes a note with what the page says and why you saved it. A thought in the shower becomes a note as soon as you are dry.

It does not much matter which tool you use, as long as it is one tool and you can search it. Research spread across several apps is not organised; it is merely stored. The test is simple: when you need a fact, is there exactly one place to look?

A note per idea, not per source

The natural way to take notes is one long note per book or article: everything from a history of shipping lanes in a single block. It feels tidy and it is hard to use, because when you need one fact you have to reread the whole block to find it.

Instead, write one note per fact, quotation or idea, short enough to read at a glance. A note might be no more than two sentences: what is true, and where it comes from. A book you read closely might produce twenty small notes rather than one large one, and each of them can then be tagged, moved and found on its own.

Write the source down first

Record where something comes from at the moment you write the note, not later. Later never comes, or it comes the week before the manuscript is due, when you are retracing your reading through a library website at midnight.

For each note, keep at least:

• The title and author of the source, or the name of the person who told you.
• Where in it: a page number, a chapter, a timestamp in a recording, a link.
• The date you looked, for anything online, since pages change.

It takes a few seconds per note. It is also the difference between a bibliography you can assemble in an afternoon and one you rebuild from memory.

Tag by where you will use it

Most people tag research by topic: ships, medicine, London. Topic tags are fine, but they answer the question you ask least often. When you are writing, the question is rarely “what do I know about ships?” It is “what do I need for this chapter?”

So add a second kind of tag, for where the note will be used: a chapter, a part, a character, a period of the story. A note about quarantine rules might carry medicine and also chapter 7 and the crossing. When you sit down to write chapter 7, you search for its tag and everything you gathered for it is in front of you, even the notes you have forgotten taking.

It is fine if a note has no use tag yet. Some research is background, and it earns its place by making you confident rather than by appearing on the page.

Keep what they said apart from what you think

A research note mixes two different things: what the source says, and your thoughts about it. Months later, it is surprisingly hard to tell them apart, and that is how a writer’s own guess turns into a “fact” that ends up in print.

Keep them visibly separate. Put direct quotations in quotation marks, exactly as written, with the page number. Paraphrase in your own words and say that it is a paraphrase. Put your own reactions, questions and ideas after a clear marker of your choosing, such as Me: at the start of the line. It looks fussy and it saves real trouble, especially in memoir, where your memory of an event and a document about it may disagree, and both are worth keeping.

Mark what still needs checking

You will not have every fact when you need it, and stopping the draft to look something up is a reliable way to lose an hour. Instead, write the sentence with your best guess and mark it so you can find it again. Journalists and editors traditionally use TK, short for “to come”, because the letter pair is rare in English and easy to search for. Any mark works if it is unusual and consistent.

Then, once a week or at the end of a draft, search for the mark and clear the list in one sitting, with your research open beside you. Checking facts in a batch is much faster than checking them one at a time in the middle of a scene.

Read your notes before you write a section

Research only helps if it reaches the page. Before you start a chapter, spend five minutes reading every note tagged for it. Not to plan the chapter in detail, just to have the material fresh in your head. The details you find again that way are often the ones that make a scene feel lived in: the weight of a coin, the smell of a ward, the phrase a grandmother always used.

If you are writing nonfiction, the same notes feed the chapter outline in your proposal, and the guide to writing a nonfiction book proposal explains how. If you are writing a memoir, notes from letters, diaries and conversations are where the two narrators of a memoir get their facts straight.

In Author Sweets

Notes sit beside the manuscript in Plan, with tags and a search that finds them. Each note can keep its Sources: the work’s title, a link and what it says there, with a citation you can copy for your acknowledgements or bibliography. Pin the notes you need for a stretch of the book and they stay under the scene details while you write.

For a quick mark in the draft itself, select a passage and choose Note on the selection, or give it a highlight colour you keep for “check this”. Highlights and notes stay out of every export and every shared copy, so a forgotten one never reaches a reader. Characters and places have Facts, label and value pairs such as a date of birth or a regiment, which are often where a researched detail belongs once you have confirmed it.

If your book is nonfiction, the page for nonfiction authors shows how the rest of the app fits that kind of book.