If there is one topic that goes nearly completely “unwritten” in the field of history, it is managing research. Whether you are writing your dissertation or writing your latest article, managing your primary and secondary sources is extremely important. This is especially the case for historians since the sheer number of sources that we use is enormous.
Back when I was writing my dissertation (in the dark ages of 2009), your options for management were pretty limited. I initially tried printing everything out, but that created mountains of paper that I seldom read once, if at all. I also tried keeping pdfs on my computer, but those were the days before cloud storage, and too many pdfs was a problem. To say nothing of the difficulty of searching for the information I wanted.
However, as I began reworking my dissertation into a book manuscript, I quickly realized that I needed to have a better system. So today, I’m going to talk about the workflow that I’ve developed using reference management software.