How do you keep track of your notes?

[wanderingwondering]

Hi everyone,

 

I suspect that this has been discussed to death, but I'm really curious and in need of some tips. I'm starting a PhD program in cognitive and developmental psychology in the fall, and I'd really like to use the months ahead to explore foundational works in cognitive science.* The problem is, most of my reading material comes from library books, so I can't annotate or keep them as I would PDF's.

 

How do you keep track of ideas, information, and references from books? My first impulse is to just jot everything down, but I'm sure someone has a more efficient way of doing it.

 

Thanks!

 

*If anyone has anything to add to my reading list, I'd be really happy to hear it! Right now I'm reading Alison Gopnik's Words, Thoughts and Theories and Susan Carey's Conceptual Change in Childhood, but I have Concepts, Kinds, and Development and Vision waiting on my shelf... I'm broadly interested in Theory of Mind, naive theories, and conceptual representations.

Edited March 11, 2014 by wanderingwondering

[bsharpe269]

I am in a different field but I keep a spiral notebook and when I read a book chapter or article, I take notes on the main points and write the book/article name and researchers at the top of the page. That way, if I want to remember which article I was reading I can easily flip back through and look. If I am having a hard time understanding what I read (which is regularly) then I take detailed notes on everything since it helps me learn the info.

[TakeruK]

I do the same as bsharpe29 in the very rare cases where the material I am reading is not in PDF form (I guess I'm lucky that everything in my field is PDF, more or less). I use Mendeley and I enter these books into my repository/library as well (so that I get automated referencing/bibliography). Mendeley also allows me to enter things in a "notes" field for every entry, not just annotating PDFs so I also type up a few key points for each item. This way, when I search my electronic Mendeley database, I am effectively able to search my handwritten notes too. 

 

In my field, most useful books are actually a collection of lengthy and influential review papers so they are also usually available as PDFs too. But in some cases, it's worth it to actually purchase the book and when I have the actual book, I just write in the margins themselves. 

 

Just to be complete, there are some cases where I might also choose to scan important articles that are old (and not available online) from a library's copy of the journal issue!

[themmases]

I use a combination of handwritten notes and Zotero.

 

I actually prefer to hand-write all my notes, but if I'm reading a PDF on my computer anyway I accept that that's slow and silly and use Zotero's notes field.

 

For my handwritten notes, I use the full citation as the header and write the page I was on when writing the note in the margin. I use a different color for quotations and, if I'm reading something more theoretical, I'll use another color to differentiate paraphrasing/summarizing the paper from my own reaction.

 

Either way, I type a few keywords into Zotero as tags as I go.

 

I find that physically writing notes helps me remember things-- that's why I do it-- so it doesn't confuse me to split things up this way. Also, it's kind of obvious if I go into a citation and see that I don't have Zotero notes for something, yet somehow knew how to tag it.

[St Andrews Lynx]

In your case: buy or find a scanner (university libraries will definitely have them). Scan important text, diagrams & images from the books you are reading, convert the uploaded files into PDFs and store them in Mendeley.  

[rising_star]

St. Andrews, I had that idea at one point but then realized it was way too time-consuming to scan all the pages I needed. I'm lucky in that there aren't loads of figures/diagrams that I needed. My notetaking strategy from books depends on whether they're in the university library, borrowed from a friend, or accessed via interlibrary loan. I take the most detailed notes on ILL books, sometimes typed into Zotero/EndNote and sometimes handwritten (depends on the weather and where I'm working). Books I borrow I take less detailed notes on, making sure I get all the main points and any quotations that I might want to directly cite later. For books from the library, I tend to hoard these (I've had some of the same ones for 2+ years) and take less detailed notes since I know I'll have them on hand to look up exactly what I need later.