Researchers, how do you take notes on the papers which you read?
I've been struggling with finding a good workflow for taking notes on the journal articles which I read. I collate articles using Zotero, yet its in-built notetaking features (and comment scraping from PDFs) is quite poor. So, my alternative so far has been to write up notes by hand, but this is pretty cumbersome and makes it take some time to refer to my notes. My approach is clearly not effective!
How do you take notes on the papers which you read? Do you prefer to use written notes, or do you type your notes? In any case, what is your preferred means of storing and categorising your notes? And are there particular software which you use, if you opt for typed notes? (At present, I use an A5 notebook. Yet, this is not alphabetised or organised by topic, which compounds my struggles.)
PhD-Student here. My workflow is pretty simplistic.
I have RSS-feeds for all journals I remotley care about. Every three months or so I take a dedicated week and sift through the new publications. I usually end up with around 75 papers that I actually download and look at. Only a very small number is directly important for my thesis work, but it helps to stay abreast very current developments in the field. Important for me is that I name the files systematically as Author_Year_Title, so that I can quickly find them even if I only remember parts of the title or the author's name.
The actual workflow then looks like this:
I highlight passages, make comments etc. in Adobe. I think it is not the most pleasurable work environment, but with an extra screen it is allright for me. Then I throw all papers into Zotero as "Batch 02/2023" or "Chapter X" for example and copy a bibliography into Word. Under each entry I then copy/paste or write relevant toughts or passages. If I feel I need to condense even further, I bite the ecological bullet and print my summaries to go over them with highlighters and pens. Then everything gets foldered away.
Despite the non-sophistication of the approach, it has always worked reliably for me. It doesn't rely on fancy software or has other major dependencies and it usually takes me seconds to find a paper or my notes on it. And thats all I want.
Personally, I have a reMarkable, which I find to be an excellent way to annotate PDFs. It's costly for what it is, but it's also excellent at what it does. I used to print out entire papers and make notes with a pen, which was a bit wasteful in hindsight but I like the "annotation in relevant places" style of note-taking on papers.
I sometimes type general notes as well: I write them up using org-roam. It's fairly easy to refer to them if you're good at keeping up with maintaining appropriate links between topics.
I still make notes physically. I also find them easier to remember than physical notes.
Same. Physical reading notes have always been the superior form for me, as less efficient as it may be. I have my own codes I use for things (like shortcuts I take when explaining things, and segmentation of my own thought responses against the texts) and I index everything so that I can find it easily later. I also use Obsidian as a mind map so that I can orient subjects and ideas swiftly.
Even using something like OneNote will at least ensure your notes are searchable. For annotating pdfs, I like drawboard.
I personally use OneNote for things like this, with bullet points for quotes and page-numbered observations, as well as highlighting the article PDFs using MacOS Preview's native functionality (select text, Control+Command+H to highlight).
My work is more in the legal context, so very textual; having multiple articles/cases/whatever in a bullet-point OneNote page helps me contextualize and connect the dots in a searchable yet freeform way.
I wouldn’t stress out about the workflow too much. For me, the point of taking notes is to make sure I’m actively reading. Even when writing review articles I rarely consult the notes I took, because I’ve gotten to know the papers.
(but I’m definitely jealous of you who do it in org, and hope to join if I can ever figure out emacs…)
I upload the pdf to onenote as an image and highlight/annotate using a pen. Bit messy but much faster than highlighting text with a cursor and adding typed comments. I have one paper per note and categorised by topic. I don't go back to them often enough to put too much effort into keeping things neat and tidy
This is a great idea. I think I'll copy it.
I try to save articles and the like to PDF, and arrange in folders based on what I'm researching/writing about at any given time (I'm on a Mac, so Quick Look [spacebar] is great for quickly previewing the files in the folders; there's an open-source Quick Look utility for Windows I also recommend). I read and highlight these PDFs in the native Preview App, then take notes—including specific or relevant quotes and page numbers—in OneNote.
I used to print the article on paper and take notes in the margin. This made it easy to put any two pages next to each other if I wanted to compare things. It also allowed me to read them outside for a change of scenery and fresh air.