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Citation's Note forms |
Overview
Taking thorough, organized notes is an essential part of the research writing process.
Citation's note forms can help you standardize and organize your notes.
With Citation, you will be able to tag your notes with keywords, so you can browse
through notes on a particular issue to refresh your memory, as you are
composing the outline or contents of a paper. You can use Citation to print all
your notes on an issue in Notecard format, so you can read through a hard copy
(some researchers find it more
useful to have printed copies of notes during the writing process). When you are actually
writing your paper, you will also be able to include an Access Key in your documents for excerpts
from your Citation Note records you want placed in your document.
Citation's Note forms
Each Note record has a field for keywords (you can enter as many keywords as you like in each
record), an Access Phrase (this will allow you to place the contents of the excerpt field in
your document), and a Reference field (which you can use to include an internet address, a
library call number, or any other type of tagging you might need to use).
For most types of legal research notes, you will want to use the Notes (Legal) form:
Once your notes are in a database, you will be able to use Citation's powerful searching, sorting, and printing abilities to help you manage the information.
Using Citation to collect and organize research notes
This is easy to see, given a concrete example. Let's say, for instance,
that you were asked to prepare a paper on tribal law.
The first thing you would probably want to do is to use the internet to research
potential sources. You could use a search and retrieval program,
such as BookWhere, to search library systems and download the results, or
search the library systems and other online services directly,
adding records for potential sources (and abstracts, when these are available) as you
locate them. As you locate potential sources and add records for them to your Citation
database, you will want to make certain you tag them with the keyword "readlist" so
that you can use Citation to write a "reading list"
of potential sources to take with you to the library.
In many cases, you can collect your notes directly from the internet. For a paper
on tribal law, for instance, you could initiate a search
on a service like Findlaw
or Lexis:
When you've located pertinent cases, you would first add a bibliographic record for the source:
Then you can easily add a record for a note, type in comments, as well as excerpts, as you are reading through the sources online. With sources like Findlaw, that display the full text of documents, you can easily copy pertinent excerpts from your browser to the Excerpt field in your Citation Note record:
The keyword list box will help you keep your notes organized and easily retrieved.
Browsing through notes on a topic or issue
There are a number of ways to review notes and bibliographic records that
pertain to similar topics. You can search for records that contain a
keyword, an author name, a journal, or a publisher/court, by using the
search button on the list box:
You can also browse through records containing a term in any field by using the Search for Record dialog:
Printing your notes as notecards
Sometimes it is convenient to have printed copies of your notes to review before
you begin writing.
Citation provides you with an output format to let you write your notes
in Notecard format to an open word processing document:
If you need to review only those notes on a particular issue or topic, you can easily use the Select feature in Citation to create a subset of the notes containing a keyword or term, and then print notecards for the subset.
Placing excerpts in your document
You can have Citation place excerpts from your note records in your document, as
you are generating bibliographic citations. Just insert the Access Phrase for the note
record into your document:
When you generate citations for this document, Citation will locate the Access Phrases for Note records, and replace these with the contents of the note record's excerpt field, as it writes your references:
Evaluate the program
Download our Evaluation version and give
the Legal Edition of Citation a test drive. All records entered in the demo version
will transfer automatically to the full version.
If you are considering using Citation as a text in a course you are teaching,
please request an examination copy
of the program.
Page created 10 May 1999; Last Edited 10 July 1999
Send comments to webmaster@legalcitation.com
Ó1999 Oberon
Citation is a registered trademark of Oberon Development Ltd. A Uniform System of Citation is a copyrighted
work owned by, and Bluebook is a trademark owned by, the Harvard Law Review Association, the Columbia Law
Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review and the Yale Law Journal. Portions of the Bluebook
reprinted in Citation: The Legal Edition with permissions.