Hi! I figured this would be a good place to ask this, but I'm interested in seeing how any historians/history majors/previous history majors handled researching for assignments. I have an archaeology research paper deadline coming up in 10 days, but I've noticed while researching secondary sources, many of the journal articles range from like 30-50 pages. When you guys work on your assignments, do you tend to consume a broad amount of literature in whole, or "skim" articles and extract key ideas/points? The research/reading stage of essay writing is something I've struggled with in college and I'm trying to look at ways to make papers less stressful. The paper is a fairly broad "explain the significance/wider meaning of this discovery/site"
I skim and extract key ideas! I'm working on my history undergraduate capstone project now (it'll be about 30 pages when I'm done), so I can tell you what I am doing! I started by making a rough outline of topics I wanted to cover, and collecting sources to make what I call an "annotated bibliography on steroids." Here is a screenshot of what some of my notes look like. I use the table of contents/index/Ctr+F in each source to pinpoint where in the source I'll find the information I am interested in. Then I mark down page numbers and quotes/paraphrases that I want to use. For my capstone, I have about 20 pages of notes like this, but that's pretty excessive--for a 10 page paper, I would probably try to get 3-5 pages of solid notes and quotes on sources.
Then when I am writing, I can go through my outline, and most of the research (and sometimes some of the writing, if I paraphrased well in my annotated bib) is already done, so I can just ctrl+f within my document of notes and sources.
I find this method really helpful--you can also mark down on your source/quote list which quotes you've used in your paper already to make sure you're not repeating yourself. I am pretty scatterbrained, but this system helps me to stay organized.
I hope this helps!