LibGuides: Academic Writing: Synthesize

Tools for Organizing and Citing Works

Below are some resources for organizing your work and information on Citing sources.

For help with citations, check out the following databases:

Academic Writer (formerly APA Style Central)
A flexible and versatile, end-to-end resource for all facets of the scholarly writing and research processes. Designed to help users develop their writing and professional research skills,
Chicago Manual of Style Online
Now in its 18th edition, The Chicago Manual of Style—with more than a thousand pages in print or more than two thousand hyperlinked paragraphs online.
MLA Handbook Plus
Includes the full text of the ninth edition of the handbook, as well as a video course paired with quizzes, plus a final assessment.

Noodletools

If you need a place to keep track of your resources, organize notes, or help format a work cited page, try Noodletools.

For help with APA style, try Academic Writer.

NoodleTools NoodleTools walks a student through the the research process--from the tracking of sources to writing the paper. Use NoodleTools to to track sources, take notes, create outlines, collaborate with classmates, and format and print your bibliography.
Academic Writer (formerly APA Style Central) A flexible and versatile, end-to-end resource for all facets of the scholarly writing and research processes. Designed to help users develop their writing and professional research skills, APA Style CENTRAL combines sophisticated learning and teaching tools, advanced writing and content management technology, and full integration of APA's best-selling Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association® to create an unparalleled web-based suite of integrated services and tools. All of the tools within APA Style CENTRAL have been created by a team of APA Style experts, which assures users and instructors a level of accuracy, consistency, and confidence not available from any other source.

Organizing Information

Collecting information together based on major points related to our topic will help to highlight more significant concepts discussed throughout the research you have found. The role of research is to bring these ideas together in a larger scholarly conversation.

Find out more information about this aspect of research here: Tutorial: Scholarship as Conversation.

A good structure for organizing your research is key to developing a well-constructed conversation based on your findings. Below are some suggestions on how to arrange your information.

Build a Bibliography

As sources related to your topic are gathered together, keep track of the bibliographic information to find it again. A simple way to do this is to keep a running list of resources on a Word doc with the title, author, publisher, and publication date.

For example:

[title], [author, A], [publisher], [publication date].

Research Strategies (5th ed.), Badke, W., iUniverse, 2014.

They Say / I Say (6th ed.), Graff, G. & Birkenstein, C., W. W. Norton & Company, 2024.

Take notes

Under the source, take note of specific concepts, chapters, or pages related to the topic.

For example:

Research Strategies (5th ed), Badke, W., iUniverse, 2014.

Chapter 8 explores how to read for research, which could be helpful for anyone wanting to take steps to analyze information and begin to process it in relation to other research. Badke discusses strategies for quoting, summarizing, and paraphrasing readings, which can help organize information (pp. 202 - 207).

They Say / I Say (6th ed.), Graff, G. & Birkenstein, C., W. W. Norton & Company, 2024.

Graff & Birkenstein explore the role of scholarship as a conversation and how we, as authors, can combine ideas to build upon that conversation (pp. 1-4).
Chapter three explores the art of quoting others in texts to build upon an idea and strengthen your response by synthesizing other research (pp. 47-58).

Connect Ideas

Bring those ideas together as you write.

For Example:

Combining ideas from other research helps build a stronger thesis argument. Badke (2024) explores the use of others' work to provide authority to one's work, giving credibility to the research. Similarly, Graff & Birkins explain that using others' works in research brings out the larger scholarly conversation that one works join as they research (pp. 1-4). By Synthesizing these ideas in research, it's clear that arguments can be made to give credit to the voices present in research while also building on to one's work and looking for opportunities to add to the conversation humbly.