Starting capstone Monday - freaked out

[davewill]

Here is what I did to organize my research...
I printed out everything I found - anything I thought could be even slightly relevant. On each source I printed I attached a page that included the source information in proper APA format. Nothing is more frustrating than forgetting a page number or forgetting to obtain the year published or some small detail that you have to go back and find later. By putting it in APA format right up front that ensured I had everything I needed and saved me a lot of time later when I went to write the paper. I also wrote out anything about that book or source that would help me describe it if I used it in the literature review. Then I put those pages into a folder for the sub-question they belonged to. You could do all this in Word or in some other word processing document. I preferred to have it in front of me.

When I wrote the paper (such as the literature review). All I had to do was pull whatever quotes I wanted to use and plug them into what I was writing. I pretty much already had the literature review and the APA style reference ready to go.

I also kept a master reference list. Any time I added anything to the paper I would immediately add that source to the master list. This ensured I didn't forget a source for my final paper.

Of course its wonderful to write the perfect module and have very few changes to make to it. However, if you get a paper back and it needs corrections that is okay. It just lets you know what you need to do to fix it for the final capstone.

I did exactly the same, except that I kept abstracts, full text PDFs when available and references in Evernote. Most of the document databases I was using would generate APA citations automatically, which I would copy and paste, both alongside the abstract/PDF, and into a references document I kept that also had links to the PDFs. I could browse my references list, then follow the link to the abstract/full text. It worked really well.