I would love to know how others structure their notes on journal articles in Obsidian?
In particular, do you create notes on general topics (e.g., visual working memory) with points taken from journal articles, in that main topic note? For example, in a visual working memory note, bullet points summarising papers on the topic.
Or, do you create notes that are specific to a journal article?
Or, both? And if both, how do these coexist in your Obsidian collection?
I (and a lot of others) have a very Zotero-oriented workflow, so Iām creating notes specific to the article. I have a āreferenceā area with notes dedicated to authors, concepts, etc. so Iām usually working through material with Obsidian as opposed to using it for invention/writing tasks.
I have a folder of notes, each devoted to one article, strongly tied to Zotero.
I have another folder of notes devoted to topics, and sub-topics, and sub-sub-topics, ā¦ Each of those notes starts out life as little more than a list of links to articles in the articles-folder, with a one- or two-sentence summary of what they say thatās relevant to this topic. Some of them grow more elaborate over time, some donāt.
If Iām trying to think more about a topic, the short summaries are usually enough to remind me of each article. But if I want to dig deeper, the article-note is one click away, and the PDF in Zotero is one more click from there.
For example, hereās the beginning of a note I have titled āDecay vs interference in working memory forgettingāā¦
ā [[Working memory]]
People who disagree with decay:
- [[Nairne2002]]: The case against the standard model ā STM forgetting isn't decay.
- [[LewandowskyOberauer2008]]: The word-length effect provides no evidence for decay in WM.
- [[LewandowskyGeigerOberauer2008]]: Forgetting in verbal STM is interference based.
- [[OberauerLewandowsky2008]]š¶: It isn't decreasing temporal distinctiveness either.
...
Pro-decay defenses:
...
The ā [[Working memory]] at the top is a link back to the MOC for the topic that this is a sub-topic of.
The silly sunglasses emoji is my personal reminder that I never actually read that paper yet and Iām just going by the abstract. (Did I just admit I donāt read everything? Obviously not. Forget I said anything.)
The name of each article-note is essentially its APA citation without any spaces or punctuation. Others would probably prefer to put the spaces and punctuation back in, but Iāve been keeping my (BibTeX) citation keys in that format (in and out of Zotero) for donkeyās years ā Iām used to it.
Anyway, maybe youāll find some ideas in all that thatāll resonate with your style of thinking.
I do both. Every source gets its own note, be it a book, a youtube video, or a scientific article. One of the most important organizing principles in my Obsidian vault is āone source = one noteā.
The source note is where I collect everything related to the source, eg DOI, authors, links to article corrections/retractions, additional published material, the actual PDF, my comments, my reading notes, interesting bibliographical data, IDs relevant for databases like Zotero, and much more. Itās the place for the countless details, that would be distracting elsewhere. The source note is also a where I document my reading goals and open questions for a particular source.
Thereās another separation in my system:
personal notes about topics, where I collect relevant stuff for a particular topic.(I call those notes definition notes, because they compare various definitions.) They might contain a list of links to relevant papers with a few keywords or bullet points or quotes, that are relevant for this topic. Because I have source notes, a lot of context ist just one click away.
drafts of future publications. (I consider them part of my project notes). A publication might be as simple as a handout or presentation in class. These notes have an audience in mind. These notes will eventually grow into some kind of self-contained documents.
I find both, definition notes and drafts, easier to write, when I have everything source-related in a separate source note.
I am a design engineer and I read a lot of journal articles and technical papers. Zotero is my reference and document manager which I do all my highlighting, annotating and saving diagrams and so on. In Obsidian I use these Zotero items as references to documents I use to design, letās say a part of an electronic circuit for example and the highlights from the datasheets of particular components in my Zotero library. To achieve an automated linking and a database sort of thing, I rely on a plugin called Zotlit for both on Obsidian side and the Zotero.
It gives me a drag-and-drop style referencing with templating options so that I can color code them in Obsidian and link them to Zotero so I can find the same sections in these documents in the future too. Images works also extremely well.
Itās been a while I was considering to write a blog post about it, but could not find time since itās relatively sophisticated. I will update here if I someday write a detailed overview of my workflow.
What I do is probably a bad idea, but Iām interested in what others think about it and how to improve.
I just focus on trying to get the keyword and/or author noted down. Those tend to be my note names.
I then manually search Zotero if I need to, or even public sources to find the paper again.
I know this is probably a bad idea, but frankly, Iām really, really lazy! Minimalism is good, but this could more like laziness. Things are messy, but quick.
Of course, if you have the same author working on the same keyword over multiple years, I might take some time to get the exact paper I wanted before, but typically I only have one in the Zotero vault.
is my personal reminder that I never actually read that paper yet and Iām just going by the abstract. (Did I just admit I donāt read everything? Obviously not. Forget I said anything.)