Tools You Can Use: Automatically Record Source Details

"Information is a source of learning. But unless it is organized, processed, and available to the right people in a format for decision making, it is a burden, not a benefit."--William Pollard

Make the Internet Your Personal Research Database

The Internet offers writers the ability to conduct powerful research. Do you struggle organizing all your sources so they are readily available to write endnotes or a bibliography or even worse, when your publisher requests your original research sources? Now you don't have to rely on your memory or photocopy a ream of documents. I've bookmarked Web pages, saved the Web page (HTML file) on my computer, and cut-and-pasted the text into a text file or Microsoft Word document. But the main drawback of storing my research in these ways is organizing and managing my research and sources.

How do you collect, organize, and keep information for endnotes or bibliographies? Cogitum Co-Citer, a content organizer, automatically records quoted text, its title, the URL, and the date you collected it. Often, I've collected research, then when I went to use it in an article or chapter, I can't remember how I wanted to use the information. Co-Citer lets you add a comment as to how this information may be useful in a book proposal or how you want to incorporate it into a chapter or title. Plus, it allows you to create folders for specific writing projects.

How to Use Cogitum Co-Citer

Collect Breaking News

Don't have time to keep up with breaking news? Select a text or a fragment of the text, put it into the collection, and return later. Create special folders for the news agencies and assign descriptive comments. Co-citer stores the complete text of articles, text fragments, or just headlines. Because Cogitum Co-Citer stores the Internet address where the text was found, you can easily link back to the full news story at any time.

Collect Aphorisms

If you find a quote you want to remember (or return to), store it using Cogitum Co-Citer. You can create folders for aphorisms according to authors, subjects, or Internet source.

Conduct Research

Writing often requires research. Cogitum Co-Citer creates a syllabus of texts you read. Because the program allows you to create and manage folders, you can create special folders or subfolders according to the source, author, or point of view. When your publisher needs documentation for your sources, collected texts can be sent via e-mail.

Cogitum Co-Citer Features

• Create and manage new collections
  
• Create and manage folders for organizing texts
  
• Add comments about the grabbed text
  
• Sort records according to various criteria
  
• Follow the link associated with the grabbed text just by clicking on it
  
• Import/export collections to work with them at other computers, to split a large collection into smaller ones, or to combine small collections into a larger one
  
• Publish the collection as a Web page
  
• Send the collection by e-mail
  
• Control how the grabbed texts and information are displayed
  
• Search the collection
  
• Print texts from a collection
  
• Delete grabbed texts from the collection