I like the way that John Erickson documents his sources in a simple and clear manner here.

Simply:

Name of author > Publication date > Page number

Uh. Why couldn’t we learn to cite sources like this all those years we spent in school? Rather than spending hours skimming back and forth between formatting guides. This is bold, no italics. You only capitalize the first letter. Minus 10 points because you forgot a comma. What hogwash.

I need to do a comprehensive post on how I read, annotate, and document books here too.

The short version is that, I mostly use Evernote.

The system I use in documenting my research follows this pattern: [Lewis 2001: 49]. It is a system used by archeologists, and I have found it to be the least cumbersome of the several methods of footnoting. It gives us the name of the author, the publication date of the source, and the page number. Most readers won’t do anything with that information, but those who wish to trace the source can find it listed in the bibliography.

-John Erickson, Story Craft (Amazon)