As we turn the calendars to December, you may be wondering how to get all that research organized that you've done for the final paper due in a few weeks...or you may be now thinking about starting that research! Either way, the Law Library subscribes to a great tool that works across different platforms, allows you to easily organize and annotate your notes, copy useful citations and download it all as a Word document for easy editing and pasting. Much of what follows is based off a Law Library article I wrote a few years back about this wonderfully useful tool. Since then, it's only gotten better! 

PowerNotes is a great new tool that helps you organize, cite and annotate your research as you work across platforms online. You can create a free account with your Wisc.edu email and have access to an unlimited number of projects that can line up with your different paper topics (Contracts, Admin Law...whatever!)

Once you are signed in, you are prompted to add a browser extension - there are extensions available for Firefox and Chrome. This extension then connects with your PowerNotes account where all your notes and highlights are stored. You can then create a "Project" which has "Topics" nested within it.

Now that you have your all the administrative work out of the way, you are ready to research! PowerNotes allows you to annotate any website, save your highlights and add notes to your highlights, organized by your topics and projects. Check out a short video by clicking on the image below for an example of PowerNotes in action: 

Powernotes Logo - Click to play video

Users are able to quickly create a new project, highlight important quotes, and add in notes. This is an effective way to keep all your work online in one place - especially if you are prone (like me and many other researchers) to using numerous tabs to do your research across propietary platforms that don't play nice together. Amazingly, your highlights are 'remembered' by PowerNotes, so when you visit that page again (and PowerNotes is turned on) you just need to hover over your highlight to see what your notes are. PowerNotes works on any website, including Westlaw, Lexis, Bloomberg Law and other databases, so you can work across any resource and save your work in one place.

Once you are ready to move to the next step in your research or writing, you can easily download your notes from PowerNotes to a Word document. The downloaded Word document includes your notes, the full citation and your highlights. All you have to do is click on the 'download' icon near the middle top of the page and you are ready to start writing.

On top of all that, PowerNotes can be disabled at will! If you do not want to use PowerNotes at any point, you just select the browser icon and choose "disable". This will hide PowerNotes until you are ready for your next research session.

PowerNotes is free to any Law School student, faculty or staff member. All you have to do is go to Powernotes.com and login with your Wisc.edu email. I am truly impressed with the amount of development that the PowerNotes team has put into continually devleoping and improving the product over the years and I think it is a highly underutlized tool that is guaranteed to give you a step-up in your writing classes. As always, please check with a reference librarian for more help or if you have any questions - you can always ask us anything! Good luck on those papers and happy researching!

Submitted by Kristopher Turner on December 4, 2019

This article appears in the categories: Law Library

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