My current note taking flow

I wanted to just write something down about how I’m trying to get better at taking notes.

I’ve been wasting too much time on YouTube on how others take notes from articles. Its a bit overwhelming all the resources out there. I thought to maybe add to the problem with a quick outline of what I do.

Initial search

I mostly look up stuff on Google Scholar. I sometimes also search PubMed. Its usually just narrowing down a search query bit by bit to reduce the number of articles to below 20K, so I know I’m getting to very specific results. I also often force the results to be specifically from the last 5 or so years to make sure its current.

Reading

I used to use Notability to highlight articles, but I’ve been highlighting in Zotero instead to try to get a better integration with my citation management software. I highlight as I read, and try to do it so that if I ever reopen the article, I can just skim really fast. I used to do policy debate in highschool, where we used a similar approach to prep complex works into the barest components. The highlights don’t make sense by themselves, but are meant to be opened as part of the article itself.

I don’t read most of the article at first. I skim the abstract and try to find whats special about the paper and what it accomplished. If it’s still interesting, I’ll skip the introduction and skim the methods, to see if there is anything particularly interesting. The introduction can be useful, especially if I’m not super familiar with the topic. Introductions often try to do this transition paragraph at the end that can be especially useful, as it may try to justify the paper.

I skim the methods because often times, the paper is just an application of an existing method. If there is something particularly interesting or cool, I might linger at a novel method. To be honest, I’m still not the best at pure mathematical methods, so I may need to spend more time trying to parse out any equations.

Results, if they are short, are worth reading fully. If they are long, though, (i.e. its more than 3 figures), I’ll start skimming after 4 or so paragraphs, with the assumption the rest of the results are supporting or ancillary analyses.

Discussions are usually a bit of interpretation of the results. I think it depends on whether the results are surprising or if they make a new and interesting counterpoint to an existing theory that I’ll spend more time on the discussion, but I may just skim the discussions.

note taking

I’ve been using Notion with the Notero plugin to get articles into Notion. It’s fun to track what articles I’ve read, and what needs to have notes taken.

I’m trying to make a sort of personal PhD wiki thing on Notion, with a summary page of topics that may be relevant to research. I always link back to the article object in Notion using the @ operator in Notion.

For the actual article object, I’ve been trying to use a screenshot of the most important figure(s) as well as a quick summary to distill the article down.

thoughts

The final steps on Notion are the hardest still, as they require me to place articles in a broader context. It’s also hard to try to get articles to all sync at this point without making Notion a mess. I’ve added close to a thousand articles into Zotero from previous research opportunities and undergrad classes, and I’m still too new at Notion to manage syncing all those over.

I think I need to get faster at creating summaries of articles and integrating into my Notion wiki. Otherwise, I am rather satisfied for now.