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Now that you have accumulated a lot of good source material, it is time to find a comfortable place and start to read. While reading a book or a paper, you will have many ideas about the source. You may want to quote a source to support your thesis, you may find one source to be contradictory to the conclusion from another source, or you may simply have a comment about a source. Taking notes is the most important part of academic writing. You need to document original ideas from quotes to prevent plagiarism.
| 1. | If the full text of a reference is available as a Web page or a PDF file, you can view the full text inside Biblioscape. In the case of the reference "Terrace, H. S. 1979" that we added in the last step, Biblioscape found that the full text is freely available as a PDF on the Web. If you double click that reference to open it, you can see the tab "PDF" is changed to "PDF*" to indicate a PDF file is available. You can click on the "PDF*" tab to view the full text.
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| 2. | When reading a source material, you can add notes to be associated with the source inside the reference editor. First, click on the "Taking Notes" tab on the right. Click the "New Note" button at the top.
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| 3. | In this example, let's add a note about the conclusion from this paper. First, select the notes folder where you want the new note to be added. Then, add "Language is not used spontaneously by apes" as the title, and select "Claim" as the "Note type". Click the OK button to add the note. |
| 4. | A new note will be added to the "Taking Notes" panel. The reference "Terrace, H. S. 1979" will be inserted as a temporary citation in the new note's content box. A link is also automatically created between the new note and the reference "Terrace, H. S. 1979". You can now type the content of the new note. Let's type the conclusion from the paper "Terrace, H. S. 1979": apes in language experiments were not using language spontaneously but were merely imitating their trainers, responding to conscious or unconscious cues. [Terrace, 1979 #74]
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| 5. | Now we have added a note. While reading the paper, you will find that its conclusion contradicts the conclusion from another paper "Patterson, F. & Linden, E. 1981". The Patterson paper reports that apes have used sign languages to each other spontaneously. We can add a link between these two references and assign "Contradicts" as its link relationship. Go to the "Links" tab and click the "Add Link" button and select "Link to Reference...".
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| 6. | Select the "References" folder on the left. In the middle panel, select the reference "Patterson, F. & Linden, E. 1981" as the reference to link to. On the right panel, select "Contradicts" as the "Link relationship" between "Terrace, H. S. 1979" and "Patterson, F. & Linden, E. 1981". Click the "Add Links" button, and click the "Close" button.
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| 7. | The new link will be shown on the "Links" tab.
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