{"id":457,"date":"2018-01-28T14:23:11","date_gmt":"2018-01-28T19:23:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/?p=457"},"modified":"2018-01-28T14:39:26","modified_gmt":"2018-01-28T19:39:26","slug":"getting-organized-in-2018-evernote-as-a-research-tool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/blog\/2018\/01\/28\/getting-organized-in-2018-evernote-as-a-research-tool\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting organized in 2018 – Evernote as a research tool"},"content":{"rendered":"

Introduction to the series<\/a><\/p>\n

Last week<\/a> I described how I get pen and paper notes into Evernote<\/a> so that I have copies of notes associated with meetings in an easily accessible electronic form regardless of whether I\u2019m working on my MacBook, my iPhone, my iPad, or my iMac.1<\/a><\/sup> This week I\u2019ll describe how I use it as a \u201cresearch\u201d tool. I put research in quotes, because I don\u2019t use it systematically for scholarly research the way some people do.<\/p>\n

Scanning or typing notes into Evernote is very straightforward, but what do you do if you are investigating a topic (or simply reading some news) in your web browser and you find an article you want to save?<\/p>\n

\"\"If you\u2019re on a laptop or desktop and working in your browser, you\u2019ll want to install the Evernote Web Clipper<\/a> for your browser.2<\/a><\/sup> Once you have the web clipper installed it\u2019s very easy. When you\u2019re on a web page you want to save, just click on the little elephant head icon in your menu bar, and a login screen will pop up where you enter your e-mail address or username, followed by one that will ask for your password. Once you\u2019ve signed in, you\u2019re good for 30 days. Then you\u2019ll have the option to save the article, a simplified article, the full page, a bookmark, or a screenshot. The web clipper remembers your last choice. I typically use the \u201csimplified article\u201d option. It saves all of the text and relevant images without all of the \u201ccruft\u201d that\u2019s on most pages. You\u2019ll see an example from Sunday\u2019s New York Times<\/em> on the left. You\u2019ll notice that you can also specify which notebook you want the clipping saved in and you can add any tags that you want.3<\/a><\/sup> You can also add your own text notes about what you\u2019re saving before the note is saved (or you can add them later if you call it up again in Evernote and want to add something then).<\/p>\n

The process is much the same on my iPhone or iPad. If I\u2019m on a web page that I want to save, I just hit the little icon that I\u2019d use to send a link by e-mail or text message and select Evernote instead. Again I can select a notebook and add tags. I can also add a note if I want. What I can\u2019t do4<\/a><\/sup> is save the page in a \u201csimplified article\u201d format. As a result, web pages I save from my iPhone or iPad often have a lot of \u201ccruft.\u201d They\u2019re legible, but cluttered. If that really bothers me, though, I just open up that note in Evernote on my laptop or desktop, use the embedded link in the note to visit the webpage again and use the webclipper in my browser to get a simplified article.<\/p>\n

I probably clip half a dozen articles per day from things I\u2019m reading. They might be articles from the Chronicle of Higher Education<\/em> or Inside Higher Ed<\/em> that I want to hang on to because they may have information or ideas that could be relevant to my work as Dean of The Graduate School, they might be an article from a scientific journal that I want to save somewhere in addition to or instead of my bibliographic software,5<\/a><\/sup> or they might be a blog post on a topic that is interesting or important that I don\u2019t want to lose.<\/p>\n

I have more than 20,000 notes in Evernote now, and because they\u2019re all searchable, I can easily find notes I\u2019ve collected on a variety of different topics, whether they\u2019re tagged by a particular topic, stored in a particular notebook.6<\/a><\/sup>, or simply in the body of the note.<\/p>\n

I should point out that these abilities aren\u2019t unique to Evernote. I have used OneNote<\/a> only a little, but it seems to provide many of the same features. If you have it available to you as part of an Office 365 subscription, you might want to investigate its features before trying Evernote. I use Evernote because I\u2019ve been using it for 10 years, I\u2019m happy with it, it\u2019s familiar, and it\u2019s integrated into my workflow. If I were starting from scratch, I\u2019m not sure it would be my application of choice, but it\u2019s served me very well, and I don\u2019t have plans to change.<\/p>\n

If I\u2019ve piqued your interest in using Evernote for research, whether for the simple kind of web clipping I do – \u201cresearch\u201d in the lightweight sense that I\u2019m studying topics and saving things for future reference – or for serious scholarly research – compiling notes and references for systematic literature reviews and the like – here are a few links you\u2019ll want to investigate:<\/p>\n