HIST 200: Introduction to History and Historical Methods (Stephan)

Here are some tips for managing the sources you find during your research. 

• Save a copy of all of your sources. Ball State provides every student with a OneDrive cloud storage account; you can access yours through myBSU. It is not a bad idea to have a locally-stored backup on your laptop, desktop computer, thumb drive, etc. too. 
• Take notes on what you find. If you write down the title and author of a source, where you found it, and what it is about, this can aid you in finding it again if you lose it and also helps you begin thinking about how you will use it when you write your paper. 
• Keep URLs (aka links) for the sources you find. Some databases offer an option called "permalink," "durable link," or just "link" that will allow you to make a permanent link back to a source. This is important because the URL in your browser's address bar might be a temporary link that will later stop working. 
• If you save your sources as PDFs, Adobe Acrobat has features for highlighting text and placing sticky notes in a PDF. This can be very useful as you think about how to use your sources in your assignment. 

Ball State University offers students access to EndNote, an application for organizing the articles you've found and creating citations for them. EndNote is available as a desktop application or in a browser-based version.

This subject guide will help you get started using EndNote: 

EndNote workshops are also offered each semester. Check our calendar for upcoming dates and times. 

Web of Science (link below and on the "Secondary sources: Articles" page) is a database with unique capabilities for identifying high impact sources and utilizing the citation chaining search strategy. 

Web of Science does not contain full text, but does contain information about articles and books. This includes the number of citations and the number of cited references the source has within Web of Science. 

• "Citations" - the number of subsequently published sources that cited the source you are viewing. 
• "Cited references" - the number of previously published sources that were cited by source you are viewing. 

A paper that is often cited is likely to have had an large impact on scholarship about its topic.

You can find such impactful articles by finding the "sort by" option above your list of Web of Science results and changing it from its current selection (the default is "relevance") to "citations: highest first." 

Web of Science also has a pair of filters that can help you identify impactful sources on your list of results. You can find both near the top of the filters column on the left side of a search results page. 

• "Highly cited papers" - This filter limits your search results to sources that received a high number of citations in comparison to other sources published during the same year. 
• "Hot papers" - This filter limits your search to papers published within the last two years that began receiving citations quickly after publication. 

Web of Science not only keeps track of the number of citations and cited references a source has, it reveals these connections between articles within the database. Citation chaining is the practice of looking for articles that cited or were cited by an article you have found. When you are viewing an article in Web of Science you can: 

• Click the number of "citations" to see a list of articles that have cited the one you were viewing. 
• Click the number of "cited references" to see a list of articles that were cited by the one you were viewing. 

Citation chaining is especially useful if you would like to base your research on high impact, frequently cited articles, or if you have found an older article and would like to find more recent ones on the same topic.