Index Card Method

Since I've been teaching at Shawnee State, I'm continually plagued by students who have no damned clue how to do academic research. Whether I assign them a five or a ten-page paper, most of them will wait until the last minute, attempt to rewrite a wikipage entry and throw in some sources they found in a 10-minute search of the internet and call it research. Occasionally, I will have the opportunity to actually TEACH a student how to conduct even the most basic level of information-gathering as part of their research - if they're even interested.

Usually, all they want to do is to do enough to just get buy. Why push themselves more than necessary?

Well, here's my simple method of conducting information from articles and other print-sources for later use; I call it the Index Method.

Originally I got the idea from a professor of mine at Ohio University; Dr. Elliot Abrams. The Index Method, perhaps unimaginatively, gets its name from the use of simple, 3x5 index cards.

The process is fairly simple and has only three phases:

Phase I: "Data Collection"

1. Buy a package of ruled (or graphed or unlined or whatever) index cards.

2. Grab whatever you're doing research on.

3. Add caffeinated beverage of your choice.

4. Record the basic citation information about whatever you're reading on an index card and tuck it into the front of the book. Collect the important information like:

• Title of the material you're reading
• Copyright date
• Publisher
• Author's Name
• ISBN #
• ...and anything else that looks handy for identifying the material for a later date.
  

There really is no set order for how you write the information down - do whatever seems right to you. They're your cards.

4. Begin reading.

5. Rather than highlighting anything that seems important (which is the graffiti of the academic world), write down the line that you find most important about the paragraph that you're reading. Whenever you find something meaningful like a bit of vocabulary or some statement that defines what the material is about jot it down on a fresh index card.

At first I would write the title at the top of the card as well as the author's name and copyright date. Then in the body of the card I would write out the quoted section with the page number in the bottom corner.

This way you have all of the information you would need to cite the source and the material all on one card.

6. Continue reading material.

7. Make more cards.

8. Apply more caffeine as necessary.

9. Once you're done with whatever book or article that you were reading collect all of your cards and throw a rubber band around them (or something there about) and set them to the side while you go through your other material for whatever project you're working on.

Take a break and come back to the cards once you've let your mind relaxed.

Phase II "Data Filtering"

This is the phase where you turn the raw cards into something more useable.

1. Re-read the cards and on the back of the card write a one or two word summary of what the citation deals with.

You're looking for a simple category of information that the card deals with. You could list a card with "VOCAB", "SYMBOLS" or simply "THEORY" or something like that.

2. Once you have all of your cards categorized (and be sure to give a category to the title card for each article, book, etc.), put them back in their rubber-bands.

PHASE III: "Data Application"

This is the phase where you need to figure out what you're doing with the information that you've gathered. Whether this is a research paper, journal article or something in between, you'll need to put the information you've gathered to good use.

1. Start by sorting the cards based on the categories on the back.

2. Figure out some kind of logical order of your paper based on the requirements.

3. Use the categories like sections in the paper.

• If you have a lot of cards about 'SYMBOLS' then figure out what you need to say about that topic.
• Jot down some ideas about what you want to say about a given topic based on what you read. Usually it only needs to be a short sentence or so.
• Once you have a number of those topic cards, start linking them together with the citations that you have like paving stones.
  
• You may have to introduce another topic card to tie one quote to another.

4. Use the topic cards and the citation cards as a skeleton to write your section.

• I would recommend just writing the topic cards and citation cards into a word document and start to throw on 'flesh' and 'skin' to make it all make sense.

Once you've finished with whatever assignment you're working on - don't throw the cards away. You don't want to have to go out and do more research if you don't have to. The problem is that it's way to easy to misplace or damage a stack of index cards.

So...move on to the last phase:

Phase IV: "Data Storage"

Index cards are great for working through things since you can sort through them and put them in some kind of logical sequence for the assignment at hand. But there's a better way of storing the information.

1. Go find a photo-copier or, if you have the patience, a digital scanner.

2. Copy (or scan) the cards in groups of 3-4 on the page.

3. Once you have all of your cards copied and stuck into a 3-ring binder, throw them, still bound, into an old shoe-box. They can still be used down the road.

4. Organize the binder into sections depending on your research field.

You can reduce a 300 page book into a dozen pages. You can turn a 20-page article into 2-3 pages of copied note cards.

So whenever you have another assignment or project (or if you're geek enough - do your own research), you can continually add to your files on a particular subject so that the next time you have to work on something - half of your work is already done.

Field Book

A friend of mine wanted to know how I was taught to layout a field book. It's a simple process by which you can use almost any notebook for most forms of field research. I learned this technique when I was in Archaeological Field School at Ohio University almost a decade ago. You could use this format for:

1. Journaling
2. Writing (character /scene development)
3. Class Notes
4. Field Research

All you'll need is a lined notebook (or graph), some colored pencils and a ruler.

I always stuck the ruler in the back of the notebook because I had to lay out a grid in the notebook in case we found something on the site.

1. Lay the ruler against the outside edge of the notebook and draw a red line down page. For sake of ease, I would just draw the line the width of the ruler since it was usually plenty of space for what I needed in the margins.

2. In the margin that you've created, you can record whatever headings you need to outline the entry. When I was doing archeology, we had to record the date, what plot we were on, what level, etc. If you were using it for class notes or story ideas, then you can change the headings as you see fit.

3. Alternate the colors of pencil you use for the various functions in the layout. I usually used a blue pencil to divide one entry from the next as it was a good visual cue. The body of the text was written however you wanted it to be and along the margin I would list any buzzwords that I knew were important from the entry. This could be anything from a "buzzword" in a conversation, a vocab word from a class' lecture, or something that you would need to easily reference.


I would circle the buzzword in the margin and point to the entry that spoke of it. Usually this was done in green.

4. Anything that was a follow-up to what you were writing about, a to-do, was added and marked with a yellow pencil.

Since it was troublesome to carry a lot of colored pencils with me in the notebook and a bit too complicated to use them while entering the data in the field they were usually used when I got home as a follow-up.

I would usually mark out the margins of a few pages in advance of where I was in the notebook so that I had plenty of room to write. Inside the book itself I would stash a green pencil since that was the color I used to mark anything important on the page.

You could easily substitute the use of colored pencils for high-liters if that's what you like