In my book-writing workshops, I offer many book-writing tips. But the questions people most want answered at the end are about tools: Beyond a word processor, what software do you use to keep track of your research? What do you use to brainstorm ideas? What about outlining?

In a workshop for faculty at Dartmouth’s medical school, people were especially interested in research tools, in particular, Evernote and EndNote. Both have been around for a while, especially EndNote, a standard for university researchers. But which is better?

The decision on which to use comes down to the computer era’s age-old question: Do you go with a database that requires a lot of up-front input into fixed fields? Or do you go with one that’s easy to load but has less (or minimal) structure? EndNote is the structure king. Evernote is the free-form prince.

I use both. But to figure out which is right for your specific project, look at it this way: What you put in is what you get out. If you’re willing spend the time to populate EndNote’s many fields with specifics—tags, labels, classifications, notes—when it’s time to write, you instantly get out the specifics you’re looking for.

Evernote, on the other hand, allows you to store the same mass of information, but you can’t manipulate it as well. For example, you can’t sort kinds of documents efficiently—by articles or interviews or books, and you can’t sort easily by date or by author. You can search tags and full text, but the result is less targeted, and you still have to do some wading through search results to find just what you want.

The obsession with a research tool is justified if you want to speed your writing. When I start on a new book, I tag every document with the chapter to which the document applies. Compared to an untagged database (or worse, paper files) this always leads to a magic moment when you hit the search/sort button: You instantly see on your screen just what you need—and better yet, nothing else.

In Endnote, you can tag all documents by chapter with a unique identifier, (e.g., “ch1” or “ch2” or “ch3,” etc.) In Evernote, you can file documents in separate folders and stacks. When it comes time to write chapter 1 (or chapter 2 or chapter 3, etc.), you can instantly get a list of everything you need for that single chapter.

In turn, you will heave a sigh of relief at how much mental bandwidth you’ve saved in document retrieval. No more desktop slush pile. You can even dispense with paper entirely. Evernote and EndNote allow you to attach full-text documents and mark them up with highlights and notes.

In my last six book projects, I’ve used no paper for research at all. I revel in no longer spending hours searching for a long-lost document. Those hours now go into writing a better book. That’s also because I use other tools—MS outline format above all. But your research database ranks as perhaps your biggest time saver.

[Revised January 2020. Originally published October 23, 2014]