1. Read a general, concise text about any given topic or subject first. Then, dwell deeper into key texts about the subject. Include as many, unique perspectives. This is easier with some subjects, harder with others or outright complicated due to a wealth of material.

2. Use/study primary material. O level guidance techniques are pretty much the standard. You just refine, develop and expand on the basic skills you learn. For example a quote by Trump now can be analyzed thematically in any number of ways if you wished. That level of contextualisation and development for sources from 200 years ago takes time, practice and guidance.

3. Journal articles if you can access them are pretty useful. They dont beat around the bush and get right down to the basics. That said access can be an issue sometimes and difficult if you dont know who or what you are looking for. Familiarizing yourself with authors is therefore very important.

4. Online sources can help drive research. A lot of humorous or serious videos can cover a range of themes that warrant actual fact checking and may yield very surprising results. Be smart with your sources and the lists you look into. Reviews help.

5. Be open to change. When I started out, I wholly considered Neville Chamberlain to be a wuss who's short sightedness consigned Europe to war. It took me years, academic work and an in depth immersion in revisionist history to understand the range of problems he faced. Ultimately, I understood his decision beyond the bones of 'he was weak'.

6. Above all else, understanding key theories that have shaped up the world is indispinsible after a certain point. You need a ground level grasp of Marxism to understand why it had much appeal in poverty ridden countries. The development of the cold war is impossible to be understood without grasping the European fears, Russian insecurity and the decline of the British Empire. The French Revolution takes a pretty interesting twist if you are familiar with Rousseau. The development of liberal thought is again an interesting prism to understanding the British Empire towards the end of the 19th century.

7. No one can tell you how to think. How you use accurate, unique and relevant information paves the way towards a train of thought or argument. It shouldn't be too hard to pick up a few books and write a paper about the causes of WWII. It is pretty hard to write a paper about resistance groups without an in depth understanding.

At least. Thats how I've always approached my assignments. Haha.

I believe that it is the makers of Zotero who made Tropy. It helps organize your research materials through key words, etc.

Speaking as a doctoral student approaching submission date in short order, it's taken me quite some time but I've developed several methods of organising my material.

The first and most invaluable of these has been Evernote. At an initial glance, it just looks like a standard note taking program. But it has certain features that actually make it intensely useful for historical work. The first of these is the tagging function. The second is the ability to receive virtually any kind of media with a simple point and click/copy paste/drag and drop. The third is the ability to set up folders within folders. The fourth is the search function.

To illustrate how this works in practise, let me provide an example. I have, over the course of my thesis, consulted some thirty odd archives of personal written correspondence in the 1860-1914 period. For each of those archives, I have photographed the collections on site, then gone home and started sifting all the papers to locate the letters of specific use to me.

Let's say I have the papers of Admiral John Fisher. I create a folder called 'Archival Correspondence'. I then make a second folder within that called 'Fisher Correspondence'. That's where all my transcriptions are going to sit. I boot up my photos from the collection, and start going through them. Whenever I find a letter of use to my project, I make a new note in that folder and title it with the date of writing and archival reference. Then I transcribe the letter into the note, before finally copy pasting the original photograph underneath the transcription (sometimes I want a second look at the original later for accuracy or somesuch). Et voila.

Many letters and collections later, I have an indexed correspondence database. It's searchable by keyword (evernote has a search bar) date, or individual collection. If I have a project I want to compile material for, I can just make a new folder elsewhere (titled say 'Conference presentation) and then copy paste the notes I know are useful into that new folder. I can even share notes and folders to other people for collaborative work.

That's all for a specific project. But my evernote also contains several folders and subfolders of ideas in varying areas. One folder might be full of web material. Another might be full of brainstorming notes. Another will have a running list of references I need to check next time I'm at the national archives. By structuring my folders right, it's all very easily accessible.

Better still, Evernote synchronises across multiple devices and stores itself on the cloud. So I can check it out on the go on my phone, at work, or on a hotel computer. If I get a new device, I synchronise with my account and it redownloads everything in the same exact order. If I make any changes on this other device, it synchronises and downloads that update next time I'm back on my other device. If a device is broken or stolen? No problem, my notes are stored in the cloud and on two other devices.

In other words, I get database functionality, the ability to store items of virtually any medium or type, multiple redundancies, and general all around ease of access and utility.