Managing a research in Obsidian

Knowledge management
1

Hi,

I’m familiar (and enthusiastic) with Zettelkasten method to perform Note Taking, which in the end allows to write the Introduction/Literature survey in papers (and of-course generate novel ideas).

However as a researcher, I wonder is there any method/workflow/plugins that embrace and allows knowledge curation of conducting experiments and managing the actual research knowledge that I’m doing.

That’s mean, I after I have hypothesis, I want to maintain the process of doing proving/ refuting those claims and document the process for the end goal of publishing the research as an academic paper.

More specifically I’m interesting in methods that are related to Computer Science/ Software Engineering research.

Any ideas and direction to doing so will help.
Thanks!

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2

This is something I have been puzzling over for a while too!

My current solution is to write my research notes as I would zettels, and then instead of linking to a literature note in the references section of the zettel, I link to a summary note about the research project. I find this works for designing/ planning research as well as taking notes on the findings. My field is psychology, so probably a slightly different use case, but might give you ideas for how to adapt it to yours!

The main things I find useful about this method:

  • it links all my notes to an overall project note, meaning that I can always search the backlinks to find a particular idea
  • my project note acts as an outline of my thinking through the different stages and contains lists of relevant notes, summaries and links to zettels based off my reading - this helps me integrate the literature with my work (e.g. to provide a rationale for a method, or to see how my findings compare to other research)
  • I can create further summary notes for particular outputs (e.g. thesis, articles, presentations) by duplicating the project note, re-titling it and editing as needed

This is currently a work in progress, but I agree there’s a lot more advice around synthesising knowledge from reading etc., than there is about managing research journals and research findings. I would definitely be interested to hear about other people’s methods too.

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