Hello AskHistorians!
This isn't part of the usual questions that are asked here, but I wanted to ask professionals about this, and I suppose this could fall into the category of "historiography".
Basically, I'm about to start reading bibliography for my PhD in Ptolemaic History, and I wanted to ask how true historians deal with working with vast amounts of bibliography. How do you manage them? Do you ahve a system? Do you write summaries of articles and books, or hope you remember everything? Do you write notations of pdf's, or print the articles, note and store them for later reference? How do you deal with "I want to remember this for later" when "later" is two years down the line?
I have some experience with dealing with bibliography thanks to the numerous essays of my Uni's and Master's Degree, specially the final thesis of both of them, but I feel I need to be more organized and thorough with the PhD. Right now I'm thinking about doing a big folder and inside different folders according to different topics, and store the pdf's there with an adjunct Word document in which to write a summary and any observations I want to remember.
So, in essence, the question would be: how do historians work with bibliography, with reading, understanding and storing the important info for later use when writing?
Thank you in advance for your responses!
Everything I read in grad school is in an EndNote database. I didn't start right at the beginning so I had to go back and add a lot in my second year, but if you can get started earlier with something like this, it will save a lot of time later. Zotero is a popular solution as well and pretty fully featured.
Everything I read got a short summary of important points and arguments (including in some cases page numbers for those things). I also used a keywords to be able to find everything on a given topic pretty easily. This was very VERY useful for keeping myself organized during my comprehensive exams year.
Your question is really on point - starting with a system and staying organized is a lot easier than getting organized partway through!
The folders and summaries (definitely the summaries! You’ll never remember later) are really helpful for me.
Maintaining an index/table of contents of all these items is critical for me.
If you are a person who needs both physical and electronic versions of things, you could print the table of contents and put the abstracts and your summaries in a binder, with the (similarly organized and indexed) summaries and full text articles saved on your computer.
Keep a standard and informative naming convention, thinking about it in terms of as if you were making it for someone else without knowledge of that article (that ‘someone else’ being ‘future you who is saturated with reading’).
Something I haven’t been able to break the code on is cross-referencing items so that you can search for them better. I see blog posts have tags, which may be a neat way to organize this stuff. The format I have in mind is like this. It’s a WordPress blog and you can see how she’s made a list of each post, numbered it, and tagged the actual posts at the bottom so you can pull up all the articles that reference and apply to different topics. This is an approach I’m considering using for an upcoming project (just for my own use, not publishing it on to the public facing version of the blog).
I’m saving your question so I can see what others are doing too!