Research Trails

A research trail is the saved path of an idea: the links in the order they were found, the queries that surfaced them, the notes that grew around them, and the moment something clicked. Trails live inside LinkCatalog as first-class artefacts, not as a side effect of bookmarks.

The reason trails exist as their own thing is that a list of links loses the sequence, and a sequence of links without notes loses the thinking. A trail keeps both. Reading someone else’s trail is the closest a catalogue gets to showing how a conclusion was reached.

Shape of a trail

• A title and a one-line question.
• An ordered list of steps: a link, a quoted passage, a query, or a note.
• A status: open, parked, concluded.
• Optional related trails.

Why keep them

Trails are cheap to write and expensive to reconstruct. Saving them as they happen is the difference between a catalogue and a memory.