Keeping track of your research
Every author who has finished a nonfiction book has had the same bad afternoon. A sentence in chapter nine states a figure, the figure is almost certainly right, and there is no record of where it came from. An hour later you have not found it. Two hours later you are reading a different page that says something slightly different, and you no longer know which one you believed.
That afternoon is avoidable, and avoiding it takes a few seconds per fact. This guide is about the record, not the checking — Fact-checking your own book covers what to verify. Neither works without the other: you cannot check a claim whose source you cannot find.
Capture it at the moment you use it
The rule has one part. When a fact goes into the manuscript, the source goes into the notes, in the same minute.
Not at the end of the chapter, not on the day you finish the draft, not in the tidying pass. The gap between using a fact and recording it is where the cost lives, and it grows fast. Noting a source while the page is still open in front of you takes seconds. Reconstructing it three months later means retracing a search you no longer remember making, through results that have since changed.
What a usable note contains
Four things. Fewer than four and you will be back here.
- The claim, in the form you are using it. Not the source's sentence — yours. If you rounded a figure or compressed three paragraphs into a clause, the note records what you actually asserted, because that is what a reader will challenge.
- Where it came from, in enough detail to find again. A domain name is not a source. The full address, or author, title, publisher, year and page. "The census site" is the start of a two-hour search, not a citation.
- The date you found it. Pages are edited and figures are revised. A note carrying the date tells you whether the number changed under you, and it is also the access date every citation style asks for.
- Primary or secondary. One word. A record, transcript, register or interview is primary; someone else's account of one is secondary. You will want to know which without reopening anything, especially when two notes disagree.
Why "I'll remember" fails
You will remember the fact. That is the problem: remembering the fact feels like remembering the source, and they are not the same memory. What you learned stays; where you learned it goes, usually within days.
A screenshot is the common half-measure and it is nearly useless alone. An image shows the text and not the address, the date, or which version you were looking at. It proves you saw something; it does not get you back to it. If you do screenshot, put the address and the date in the same file, directly underneath.
In the tools. Nothing here stores your research, but the Interior Formatter builds front and back matter from fields, so a sources note, a bibliography or a permissions acknowledgment is set with the book rather than pasted onto the end of the last chapter. Start your book → · about the tools
Permissions live in the same note
Some sources are not only sources. Anything you might quote at length, reproduce, adapt or print — lyrics, a poem, a photograph, a long passage of prose — carries terms as well as an origin, and the terms belong in the note beside it.
Record who holds the rights, what the license or permission statement said, and where you read that. Do it at capture, because the alternative is identifying and tracing a rights holder a year later from a file that says only "poem". That is not note-taking; it is a separate project with its own correspondence and its own waiting. Quoting other people's work in your book covers what actually has to be cleared and what does not.
Web sources disappear
Links rot. Sites reorganize, companies fold, articles move behind a paywall, and public bodies quietly replace a page with a newer one carrying a different number.
So save a copy of what you relied on, not only a pointer to it. A PDF of the page, or the file itself, stored with your notes. The copy is for you, it is not a republication, and it is what lets you answer a challenge two years after the page goes dark. Keep it wherever your manuscript backups live — Backing up a manuscript, properly applies to the research folder as much as to the draft.
One file beats a system
Organize nonfiction notes by chapter and fiction notes by topic, and stop there.
Chapter order suits nonfiction because that is how you will search: you are rechecking chapter nine, so you open chapter nine's notes. Topic suits fiction, because that research is not chapter-shaped — it is about trains, or coroners, or one street in 1961.
Past that, resist. The elaborate setup with tags, cross-links and a dedicated application is the one abandoned in month three, with half a book's research stuck inside it. The best system is the one you are still using in month six.
Fiction's version is lighter, and real
Novelists tend to assume none of this applies. Most of it does not. One part does.
It is the detail you looked up once — the flight time, the rank, the year the bridge opened — used in chapter three and contradicted in chapter twenty, because by then you were going from memory. That is a note-keeping failure, and it reaches reviews as carelessness.
Keep those lookups where your other settled decisions live. The style sheet: how a series stays consistent is already the file you open to check how a name is spelled; what you looked up belongs on the same page, with its source beside it.
Make your book
The tools are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Fact-checking your own book · More: Quoting other people's work in your book · Citations and bibliographies in a printed book · The style sheet: how a series stays consistent