What no one tells you (but everyone agrees on) when you’re starting any research project and it’s your first time, is that it’s normal to be drowning in information and the plethora of resources on any given theme.

Should you be so lucky and be involved with an emerging topic on which the buzz is still deafening, forget seeing the wood for the trees for at least a year. In a smaller, summer-length project, there is no such leisure of time so the ever increasing panic of having not made meaningful decisions about your research question three weeks in, can’t really help with you getting organised enough to produce a tangible product of your early reading.
If you’re a perfectionist and a procrastinator, this is manifested in the number of tabs you may or might not have open on any of your devices at any one time. Developing a discipline to find something and immediately read, capture, summarise and reference it for later, can be hard while for every tab you close, you open 5 more.
Of course, technology jumps in and lends a hand with bookmarking, RSSing and curating tools, but there are so many of those, you need a separate window with 35 new tabs just to make a decision on which ones are most appropriate for your particular style of working.
So far my choice of pinboard, multiplx, scoop.it and mendeley; seems to have most areas well covered without too much crossover.
Mendeley gets all the journal papers, I multiplx all the worthwhile blogs I know I will want to keep up with and for any articles or one off opinion pieces in between I use pinboard. Scoop.it is a little klutzy for me but I use it because it’s a great way of following other people’s topics and finds. Connecting everything in a blog means this part of managing my resources almost takes care of itself.