System for taking and organising reading notes

Posted by Dr Andus
Dec 5, 2011 at 03:07 PM

Dr Andus wrote:
>I’m sorry guys but I disagree about the handwriting thing. As I said, having 5 years
>worth of notes in 9 notebooks with 200 pages each makes it a very ineffective medium
>once it comes to having to pull out notes based on particular themes. There is a limit to
>the effectiveness of post-it notes sticking out… Also, I need access to the notes
>quickly. A digital search is instant, while doing the same with the hard copy
>notebooks could take weeks.

P.S. I think the disagreement stems from the scale of the project at hand. If you are reading for something that you will write up soon in a matter of days, weeks or a couple of months, handwritten notes are fine because you still remember where everything is. However, with a long-term research project (such as a PhD that can take between 3 to 10 yrs), you will look at hundreds of documents (I have 1700 references in my EndNote file) and take thousands of notes. The writing-up only happens at the end, and after 4-5 yrs you want to be able to find the relevant info quickly. So it’s not so much about personally remembering and understanding but about organising, analysing, searching, re-discovering and retrieving targeted information that you no longer remember where it is exactly.