Today I was going to do a video that was
all about the various bit of literature
I've been reading recently but then I
thought what might be useful potentially
to others is if I show you my method for
reading and taking notes on journal
articles, papers, essays and books. So,
here I've got a paper I first read yesterday
called 'Cosmopolitan cities: the frontier in
the 21st century?' and I'm already halfway
through my process of kind of reading
and taking notes upon this particular
paper. You might be able to see I've
already gone through and highlighted
lots of little bits. Now, I tend to use
both highlighting and note-taking but I
use them both in a slightly different way.
If I've highlighted something, it essentially
means I can go back and I can read
through this paper the next time much
quicker than previously.
So, what I tend to do is pick out
sentences that describe the rest
of the paragraph. So, in the abstract there might be a
little bit more highlighted thanlater on
where it starts to get a bit more sparse
where I've highlighted and where I
haven't. So, in a sociology paper like this
particularly what I'm looking for is anywhere
where it explains in a simple sentence what
the study is that's going to be carried
out or perhaps explains in a simple
sentence the findings. Here we can see,
for example, that the authors have said
that 'we conceptualize cosmopolitan
cities as urban areas whose cultures
emphasize values including autonomy,
freedom, egalitarian and mutual respect'.
Now that is not only useful for my reading
of the article but also for my writing
later on. So that's where my notes start
to come in. So here is Evernote, which is a note
taking application, and what I'm going to
do is I'm going to make a new note and
I'm going to call it 'Cosmopolitan cities:
the frontier in the 21st century?'.
What I also do (and I stole
this tip from a thesis whisperer article) is that I
used the tags in here. So I've already got
a notebook called PhD but that's got, as well
as notes on literature,
administrative notes too and notes on
supervisions. So, what I'm going to do is I'm
also going to tag this one literature notes
and I'm going to tag it with the names
of the authors. Tagging it with the names
of the authors means that when i'm
continuing my reading I might be able to
group together some of the work by
grouping together a body of work by a
particular author. The first thing I'm
going to do in the actual body of the
note is I always jot down the full reference
for the particular article I'm working
on. This is really useful as I've found previously
I've done an awful lot of searching for a
reference for a particular book or a
particular article and had to go back to
the article and find it. If it's in my notes then
it's there, I can just copy it down and
bung it in a bibliography where I might
need to use it. So, with the reference now
jotted down what I'm going to do is start
scanning through and look for bits that I might
pull out that might actually become
useful for my writing later.
Now this will differ to what I've highlighted
because my goal with highlighting is
that I can come back and scan through
the article and, if i'm looking for
something in particular, I can use the
highlighted sections as a bit of
orientation to find what I'm looking for. The
bits that I jot down will often be bits
I've highlighted but I won't jot down
everything that I've highlighted, if that
makes sense.
The first thing i'm going to do is I'm
going to jot down this quote that I
found a little bit earlier.
And, as you can see, what I do is I
always put the full inline citation at
the end of the sentence.
This is a personal thing that just helps me
get the author's names and dates in my head
so that they're a bit more stuck in. That
bit can be a bit repetitive with some
work but it does really help kind of
lock that in. Now there's something doubly
interesting about this particular quote
here. So, I'm really interested in how we
define a cosmopolitan or metropolitan city
as opposed to a non-cosmopolitan or
non-metropolitan city. And that's why I've
taken that particular quote there. But what it's also
got is a reference to and a work by
Mosterin in 2005. So what I'm going to do
is go back to my note-taking article and
I'm going to do a quick To Read section
where I'm going to put Mosterin, 2005.
Which means that when I get to the end of
the article I can copy down all of the
things that I think I should go and read from
this article and I can search those out
and read those articles as well. And that,
very simply, is my note-taking method for
reading and understanding papers. So,
highlighting for reading and being able to
go back and scan the article it's note-taking
for things that I might be able
to use directly in my work. Other
note-taking options obviously do exist
and if your method differs from mine
then please do let me know down in the
comments. It's always really useful to find out
how people go from taking a massive body
of literature and taking out the work
that they need. Of course, if you have
enjoyed this video, I'm thinking about
maybe doing some more little things like
this that, kind of, give an insight into my
academic process. So, if you enjoyed
this then do hit the subscribe button.
Cheers!