Skip to content

Taking & Making Notes for Academic Work

Updated: 2022-12-23

Whether you are a student, educator, researcher, or anyone who needs to work with ideas, information, or resources; taking and making notes are critical skills and an important part of our workflow.

I went the longest time relying on highlighting and annotating what I read or simply bookmarking interesting resources. But when I started taking and making notes, recalling information, making connections, synthesizing across multiple sources, and generating new ideas all came easier.

Below I’ll outline my own note making process and then share some curated resources to help with your own note taking and making to move your work forward:

Contents

Process for Taking and Making Notes

Across the countless videos available that outline varied approaches to taking and making notes, many have suggestions that can be traced back to the fantastic book [affiliate link] “How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers” by Sönke Ahrens, which details (wait for it. . .) how to take smart notes! How to Take Smart Notes is an excellent resource and I recommend taking a look.

The other name that pops up is Niklas Luhmann and his concept of Zettelkasten, an approach to taking and keeping notes that involves boiling concepts down to the most important and foundational information on (originally) index cards, where each card has one specific idea or bit of information, and then organizing the index cards in a manner so that they can “link” to one another. Many people have digitized this process and, again, you can find countless resources on the concept of Zettelkasten and related workflows. Here’s Chris Krycho on What is a Zettelkasten for a starting point if you are interested.

Next I’ll outline my own process for taking and making notes and then provide some curated resources on other approaches to making notes.

My Current Process for Taking and Making Notes

My current for process for taking and making notes borrows from aspects of Ahrens’s How to Take Smart Notes and the concept of Zettelkasten but tweaked for my own workflow and what I find helpful for teaching, thinking, research, and project design & management. My process is currently linked with the affordances of the app Obsidian.

You’ve probably noticed that I keep referring to taking and making notes. I like the idea of making notes, which I first heard from Nick Milo. From here on out I’ll stick to “making notes” and note making for the same reason that I prefer to refer to generating data and data generation (in a research context) – both acknowledge our roles and actions in the process.

Note: This is hardly a linear process. Think of the following as a general guide, not like a strict sequence.

Making Notes from Texts such as Research Articles and Books

  1. Before I make notes, I read through a text several times, highlighting and annotating as I go.
    • If you are annotating/highlighting digital texts online such as websites, e-books, Twitter, etc. consider using the app Readwise, which consolidates and organizes all of your highlights (and even integrates into other apps such as Obsidian). Sign up for Readwise with this affiliate link for a free month (and I get one too – just click on the link at the top of the site that says “sign up here to redeem my extra free month”).
  2. After I’ve marked up my digital PDF or other text (that I store in DevonThink and read in PDF Expert), I start the process of reading through the highlights and making meaning of the text.
  3. At this point I open a new file in my “References” folder in Obsidian (use whatever note taking app works best for you – info on this below) and begin creating a “literature note” (see below in types of notes).
  4. I use a template for my notes, so I insert my template into the new Obsidian file and start by copying and pasting important highlights from the PDF (I’ll explain why in the next section). Here’s a pic of my template:
  1. As I copy and paste highlights into my literature note, I start to cluster related ideas around each other (regardless of where they appear in the original article).
  2. I create headings to organize and make meaning of the notes. This is somewhat similar to a process some people might use when analyzing data in qualitative research.
  3. As I copy and paste content from the article into my literature note file, I add my own thoughts, paraphrase, and often add connecting text to continue meaning making and organizing the notes. I am very intentional and deliberate in making the following clear:
    1. writing and phrasing that appeared in the original (by quoting directly and in quotation marks with the page info)
    2. text that I’ve paraphrased (no quotation marks)
    3. my own thoughts (italicized and preceded and followed by “//” i.e. (//these are some of my own ideas about this aspect of an article.//)
  1. I sometimes indicate quotes that I find particularly important by using blockquotes.
  2. As this process occurs I often think of related concepts or ideas that I may or may not already have notes on in my Obsidian vault. (Here’s how I set up Obsidian for academic work, if you are curious)
    1. If I already have a note on this idea or concept, I create a “backlink” to the existing note
    2. If I do not already have a note on this idea or concept I sometimes create a link to a new note but leave it empty for the time being.
    3. This process depends on the application you are using.
  3. Later on, I go through the literature note intentionally and create more focused notes on specific concepts and synthesize across multiple literature notes. Watch this video where I demonstrates this process of creating concept-based notes from a literature note.
    • This is key for synthesizing and connecting across the literature. It also helps create resources that become useful for future work!

Quote or paraphrase?

A lot of people who speak about note taking and personal knowledge management (PKM) promote the idea of paraphrasing texts rather than quoting directly in notes. The idea here, is that copying and pasting text directly won’t help with making meaning of the text or remembering it.

While this may be the case, I find it very important to include direct quotes in notes.

I include paraphrasing in my notes, but I need to look at my notes and know what ideas and text is mine and what is from the original author(s). Additionally, when paraphrasing, my understanding or perspective might change over time, so I want to have easy access to the original text since I might come to it and engage with it differently over time. In addition to avoiding plagiarism, this is important to my writing and thinking processes and I recommend you develop a system that works for you to include direct quotations (and appropriate citations) along with your own paraphrasing and ideas.

Making Notes from Presentations, Lectures, Podcasts Etc.

When taking notes live during a presentation, lecture, podcast, YouTube video, or other live situation, I simply keep a running note. People have all types of approaches. I pretty much listen and then jot down notes that I think are important.

I typically wait until later on to organize the notes and make connections, though this is more of an organic process. In some cases such as in presentations I’ll keep an original copy of the original set of notes in one place even after splitting off key ideas into their own notes. In other cases I might delete the original set of notes once I have the most important points transformed into their own notes.

Types of Notes

Once you dive into the world of note taking and making, you’ll find a lot of different terms for the type of notes that people make.

For scholarly or academic work, literature notes are one of the more common types of notes you might make. But there are other types of notes that are important

You might find the following types of notes by Mark Koester helpful for thinking about how you might make notes. I’ve summarized his “six primary types of notes” and added some additional info in italics.

  • Impermanent, Fleeting notes
    • Rough concept while reading, hearing something, thinking etc.
    • These get processed at a later date
    • I use Drafts for impermanent, fleeting notes and then occasionally transfer my notes from Drafts into Obsidian and organize and flesh these notes out.
  • Permanent, Insight or Smart Notes(this is closer to the Zettelkasten approach I mentioned above)
    • “Atomic” note
    • Short and precise (and focused on one specific context)
    • In your own words (I typically include quotations for the reasons I discussed above)
    • Often tagged and connected to other notes
    • I use Obsidian for permanent notes
    • When I have time, I transform my literature notes into multiple permanent notes that are focused on specific ideas. These permanent notes often contain information from multiple literature notes (and often link back to the literature notes).
    • Ahrens (in the book Smart Notes — see above) refers to these notes as Evergreen Notes.

  • Project Notes
    • meta organizational notes
    • a way of reflecting on a set of ideas
    • In Obsidian these are often Maps Of Content (MOCs)
    • Mindmaps might also serve as project notes (I use XMind)
    • Tinderbox files might also serve as project notes
  • Writings or Creative Notes
    • Blog posts or writing projects
    • I currently use Scrivener for big writing projects – but the notes in Obsidian (and Xmind or Tinderbox) are extremely helpful for writing projects.
    • One of the most important aspects of making notes is that they can be used across writing projects rather than locked into a particular writing project/
  • Summary or Structure Notes
    • Entry points into a particular topic
    • In Obsidian these are also Maps Of Content (MOCs), mindmaps, or tinderbox files
  • Collection or Collector Notes
    • Links, highlights, quotes etc.
    • Typically scattered around Drafts or bookmarked (now with raindrop)
    • Eventually work with these and turn them into more permanent notes

Additional Resources on Taking and Making Notes

Share Your Perspective

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.