Reading a source

One source’s own page: the document, what it says, how it connects to your project, and how to cite it.

Open any source from the library and you get its own page. With enough space, the main content sits beside a sticky rail on the right; in a narrower page or source preview, those controls stack below the content. The main content runs masthead, then what your advisor made of it, then how it connects to the rest of your project, then the bibliographic details, the designs, and the terms it uses. The rail holds what you reach for while reading: reading status, “Cite this” and the document itself. Most of your actual reading time happens here, so it pays to know what each part is telling you.

The masthead

Title, authors and publication facts, all of which edit in place, so fixing an author list that came out of a bad PDF extraction propagates the correction everywhere afterwards.

What your advisor makes of it

A short note about this source in the context of your project, covering how it bears on your questions and where it agrees or disagrees with what else you have, with Open conversation carrying it into the Advisor with this source already in scope.

Notice that it is not a summary, since a summary of a paper you can already read is close to worthless. The hard part is seeing how one paper sits against forty others you half-remember, and that is what this note goes after.

In your project

The real connections, meaning which of your research questions this source bears on and which of your notes cite it.

This section answers “why did I save this?”, a question that gets harder every month, and an empty section means the source is not yet doing any work in your project, which is fine for something you imported yesterday and telling for something you imported a year ago.

Details

The full bibliographic record of authors, editors, publisher, volume, issue, pages, conference and chapter, with the fields that suit the type.

Edit details fixes anything wrong, and this matters more than it looks, because these fields are what References formats into your bibliography, so a mistake here ends up in your thesis. Give anything you plan to cite a quick pass.

For sources carried over from the earlier version of Quester, existing titles, keywords, and design selections and descriptions are protected from automatic replacement during reprocessing or Advisor updates. You can still correct them yourself.

Designs

Four dimensions, being Research, Sampling, Measurement and Analytic, with anything you have not recorded reading “Not specified”.

Filling these in is optional and pays off in aggregate instead of one paper at a time, because recorded across a library they are what Composition reads to tell you your corpus is 80% cross-sectional survey work. That kind of finding changes a methods chapter, and you cannot see it one abstract at a time.

Keywords & terms

The terms this source uses, and how they sit against the vocabulary of the rest of your corpus, which feeds Terms and draws from it.

The rail

Status, running Not started, Reading, Note taking, Completed and Archived, which you set here as you work, since this is what makes the library filterable back on Sources.

Cite this, giving you the formatted reference in your citation style, the in-text citation and the BibTeX entry, each with a copy button, and letting you switch style for this one lookup without touching your project default. It is the fastest path from reading to writing, since you copy the in-text citation into your draft and carry on.

Document, holding the attached file, viewable and downloadable, and if there is no file you can upload one here, because the reference and the file do not have to arrive together.

Manage, where you delete the source or flag it, and flagging reports a processing error to us, so use it whenever extraction has mangled something.

A working pattern

Open the source and set status to Reading, then read the document in the panel. When something deserves keeping, write it in Notes and link it to this source, because that link is what makes the note findable from here later. Fix any metadata that is obviously wrong while you are looking at it, and set status to Completed or Note taking when you stop.

Do that consistently and you end up with a library where you can tell what you have read, what you made of it and why you kept it, whereas doing it inconsistently leaves you with a folder of PDFs, which you already had.

Next: Notes.