NoodleTools for Researchers

NoodleTools notecards afford you space to think as you gather facts, opinions, and evidence. Besides giving your notecard a short, descriptive title and identifying the source it comes from, you will work with three primary fields:

• Direct quotation (“A”): Store source material for future reference. Highlight and annotate to ensure close reading.
• Paraphrase or summary (“B”): Explain the source material in your own words. Check your understanding.
• My ideas (“C”): Reflect and engage. Articulate ideas, assumptions and questions. What do I wonder? How does it fit with what I know? How should I follow up?

Notecards help you strategize and plan how you will use your sources. When you create a notecard you:

1. Save the author's original words, phrases or images from a source you intend to use in your research, and
2. Think about how to express those ideas and expand on them in your own words. Create one notecard for one idea or fact, and link each notecard to a source citation.

When you are ready to add notes to a source, the simplest place to do that is on the Sources screen. On your Sources screen, choose which source you want to create the notecard for then click the "New" link in the "Notecards" column. The saved notecard will automatically be linked to that source.

Watch this brief video to see how to create a notecard in NoodleTools:

Click the link below to read step-by-step instructions.

Watch the video below to learn how to fill in the “Direct quotation,” “Summary or paraphrase” and “My ideas” fields.

Check out the link below for more on how to use visual clues in your notecards.

The Notecard Tabletop view is a space to organize information visually. By using the features of the Notecard Tabletop view, you can start to create the flow of your research. You can even outline your paper or project.

Check out the links below to learn how to manage your notecards.

Depending on what you are working on, notecards can be viewed and edited from (a) the Notecard Tabletop View, (b) the Notecard Detail View or (c) the Sources screen.

The Notecard Detail screen can be helpful when:

• You want to view the content of multiple notecards from notecard piles, and 
• When you are dragging notecards into the outline, since you can view the full notecard as you decide where it belongs in the outline.
   

Click the link below to learn more about working with the Notecards Detail View.

An outline is a good way to start thinking about the structure of your paper or project. Dragging notecards into the outline allows you to start thinking about where your facts and evidence will be used.

Click the links below to learn how to create your outline.