These are the files you should be keeping as we go along during the semester.  Remember that this is just a guide.  Many aspects of these documents should be customized to correspond to your style and needs.

1. Proposal
2. Research Plan/ToDo
3. Chapter Outline
4. Research Log (not the same as plan, here you keep track of steps within any one category of place, type of material, chapter or subject or whatever)
• One section for each kind of search
• web
• library visit
• specific database
• sepecific reference guides...
• A section for "results" that allows you to keep track of records that you will then want to lookup, borrow, photocopy, read, etc.
5. Research notes (your actual notes on individual items kept on the PC or 3x5 cards or 3-hole punch sheets or some other flexible system).  Soon we'll be able to use Nota Bene for this.
• What do you write on your research notes?
• Author(s)
• Title
• Publication data
• Date
• Page
• quotes from the document
• your own response to the document, interpretation, notes to yourself about what to do with it
• keyword entries (if using an PC database model)
• Location, source origin (both where you read and where the original is located, if relevant)
• Make sure you devise a system that allows you to list many bibliographic items that you have not yet located and have not yet taken notes on
6. Chronology
7. Discussion of how your project might use quantitative data with tables, spreadsheets, examples, hypothetical discussion, etc.
8. Organized, annotated Bibliography of useful items
9. Questions file organized by chapter, theme, etc. (your loose ends file)...allows you to write out-loud...keep track of minute things that don't yet make sense.
10. Paper itself with all component parts (described later)
11. Abstract