How do you sort your research data for writing blogs, whitepapers, articles and notes?

As a seasoned journalist I had to deal with a lot of PDF documents, powerpoint presentations, infographics and interview audio files. So I ma going to share my experience here.

Mendeley is the best tool in the industry to help you with organizing your research (in the form of PDF documents), I believe it is essential to be able to do them manually as well. Something they teach you a lot at J-schools.

My format is the following:

1. Create folders (directories) on your PC in the form of weeks (w1, w2 etc).
2. Within a weeks folder, create the folders based on the sub-headings - your main topics of focus under your thesis around the main subject.
3. The third layer of folders could be either, authors, or journal names.
4. Finally, you could introduce each PDF, infographic image, excel sheet with proper naming. Use a nomenclature - naming format identical to how mp3 are names. In this case you could follow the citation format you use be it APA or MLA.

TIP: Each PDF has a section of properties, make sure you fill the tags section with all the terms that will help you look for the files in the future.

Strongly recommend: To create an excel sheet of all your PDF and folder structure that will serve as a reference point and help you to replace missing files before you are done with your research, thesis etc. Print this sheet to keep a hard copy

Backup a copy of your files on a weekly basis to Dropbox or Evernote.