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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 mailto:legalcitation@oberon-res.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.