Google Keep and Docs for Research

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By Tracey Brown, Instructional Technology Teacher Specialist

If you have students doing research projects and you haven’t discovered Keep and Docs, you might be doing it wrong!


The combination of Keep and Docs has cut the time it takes me to produce a quality research paper in half! No joke, in half. I used to waste hours rereading articles to find that quote I remembered seeing or to remind myself which one included that information I wanted to cite. I had so many tabs open during the writing process it was hard to keep track of where anything was and hard to get a rhythm going as I kept starting and stopping to reread. Sometimes I wrote entire paragraphs only to delete them and start over because it didn’t align with the point I was trying to make. I was just lacking the organization I needed to make the process more efficient. That’s when I decided to add Google Keep into the mix and just like that cute little logo, a light bulb went off for me.

My Efficient Research Process

My process now essentially has three phases. Phase one is gathering articles. At this stage I am strictly looking for titles and abstracts that seem to match my topic. I don’t thoroughly read articles yet, I skim. My goal is to gather as many articles from databases or the web that seem to fit my topic, usually a minimum of ten but it should be determined by the requirements of the assignment. A good rule of thumb is two articles per page in the research paper; so a five page paper means ten articles. You might not ultimately use them all, so going overboard is good at this stage. During this phase I begin a Google Keep note. In the note I include every article I find. To save myself time later, I reference the articles in the APA style that I will be required to use in the final paper and I include the hyperlink to the article online and a note about which database it was found in. These help me find the article again for phase two.


Phase two is where I really begin doing research. I will return to each article and begin reading them. If it turns out an article does not fit my topic or actually disputes it, I will remove it from my Keep note. For those that I ultimately decide to include I begin taking notes under the article’s reference in the Keep note. I will type out ideas from the article or copy and paste entire quotes with the page number in case I want to include them in my paper when I begin writing. Once I have my notes and quotes from every article I may choose to cite, I am ready to begin writing.


Phase three is the writing process. This is where the partnership between Keep and Docs really shines. I begin a Google Doc and open my Keep note in the sidebar. As I am writing I include information from my notes and know exactly how to cite them. I decide whether to include a quote or paraphrase it as it best fits into my writing. I can also build my reference page with a simple copy and paste, another huge time-saving tip. It allows me to just sit down and WRITE. I don’t have to have 14 tabs open with each article. I’m not bouncing between them re-reading the same paragraphs over and over to remember if this idea came from Smith or Jones. Being able to focus on writing allows me to build ideas on one another ensuring that the paper flows, rather than a disjointed collection of loosely related article summaries. I definitely spend more time in the pre-writing process which might frustrate some who buy into the philosophy that the quicker you get started the quicker you get done, but putting the work in before the writing saves me so much time. My philosophy is, do it right the first time. And Keep and Docs helps me do that.

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