Note taking ideas for academics (eg political science)

Knowledge management
1

Hi,
Just looking for basic note taking tips and ideas, or how others manage their note taking with Obsidian, for academic reading (news, articles, etc) - mainly political science.
I’m a PhD graduate but I am still stuck with finding a decent workflow, and it is really causing me to be unproductive.
The main issue I have is how much writing to do when reading news etc.
When I finish reading an article I get anxious over what to write down as a note - eg, just some comments about the news piece on one note, or add the ideas about the news article to an already existing topic note, etc etc.

So, I’m looking for advice on best-note taking practices from academics in a similar field.
Yes, I understand that workflows are personal and best suited for one’s own needs. But I have been struggling with information management and looking for recommendations of others’ workflow to try out for a while.

Any help would be appreciated.

Cheers.

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2

Hello,

I’d like to share with you the system I’ve set up as a historian – which I imagine is fairly similar in terms of epistemology and, therefore, in daily practice to that used in political science – for producing articles, books and my lectures at the Sorbonne.

  1. General organisation

My notes are divided into two main categories.

a. Atoms

b. Molecules (the metaphor isn’t especially sophisticated, but it helps me think about my overall organisation).

Atoms are “atomic” notes, divided into several types, each with a different heading:

  • References: books and articles with their basic information (author(s), title, year, etc.) and a Dataview listing all notes that refer to them.

  • Things: these are short definitions for concepts, companies (my original field is economic history), places, etc.

  • People: individuals (authors, but also historical actors and figures relevant to my topics).

  • Ideas: personal ideas that come out of my reading.

  • Events: these are “ideas”, but since I’m a historian, ideas that can be placed in time (i.e. with a date) are considered events.

Molecules are

  • molecules (tagged “molecule”) that list several atoms (just links, so the titles of the notes).

Example:

“The notion of time in colonial India” will list several notes such as:

  • Mistaken modernity (a concept)

  • The cyclical time of Hinduist myths is used alongside the linear time inherited from colonisation (an idea).

  • etc.

  • Maps of content, which I think of as “super-molecules” because of the general nature of what they list: only molecules (not ideas, events, etc.).

All the maps of content are listed in a note called “index” at the root of my vault.

  1. What I do with it

On this basis, I have a “writing” folder that lists drafts of my articles, books, and lectures, which I begin a bit like a molecule (copy-pasting links), then develop by writing within them, and finally export to Word to finish drafting or if I need to write collaboratively with colleagues.

  1. Advantages

I no longer lose anything compared to what I was able to manage with folders and Word files; I add bits and pieces as I read, instead of storing long reading notes in a folder whose contents I forget.

I’ve reached a kind of serenity in my work with this system, which is very satisfying.

I hope this helps to clarify things for you.

Benjamin

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3

You might find a couple of articles from Sascha Fast interesting and possibly helpful.

and, on reading and note taking

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4

My experience is primarily in the hard sciences end of the spectrum, but perhaps my approach will help you? I have a set of templates for journal articles, books, conference presentations etc. for which I not only list properties like title, authors, year, and other important bibliographic information, but I have properties for “cited by” and “cites”, and topic specific properties (e.g. one for listing which archaeological sites provided samples discussed in the paper, but in politics you might have a property for “political party”, or any other category for which you could divide things). With all that stuff in the properties, that leaves the body of the notes for any combination of direct quotes from the text and your reactions to what you are reading. You absolutely want to include enough information in the body of the note that your future self will remember which article this one is.

Assuming you are working on a literature review, it is good to have both the review and your notes for a specfic source open at once. Put your notes in the note, and in the review, say something on the lines of “As Micky Mouse says in their 1932 analysis _____, but this directly contradicts the thinking of Porky Pig (1945) _____”, with links to the notes you took on both articles. Then, in a couple of years, when you are cleaning up the literature review for final thesis submission, you can click through and see if you are still happy with what you said about them in your review, or if further research elsewhere means you have to change something. Clicking into graph view, and filtering by some of the properties you regularly use will show you connections that might be important when cleaning up the review…
Where ever possible I have an internal link to another note in the property

5

I am very interested in your comments. I am new to obsidian.
Can you share the properties that you have chosen for templates for (1) journal articles, (2) books, (3) conference presentations ?

Thank you for providing your input

6

Sorry, I missed the notification, so didn’t see this till the next time I had a question of my own and opened the forum. Hopefully you have a good set of properties by now, but on the off chance that it may still be helpful, here are the ones I am using. (Keep in mind that my current role is working as a project assistant/data steward, and am not actively doing research and publishing–if I were I probably would have put a bit more thought into template designs, but this list is way better than no properties for literature based notes:

`Book Template
---
Title:
year:
Volume:
Location:
Pages:
tags:
doi:
finished reading:
UrL:
Type: book chapter
Book Series:
date added: "{{date:YYYY-MM-DD}}"
Authors:
synopsis:
ISBN:
cited by:
---

For a book chapter I add even “chapter of:”

`journal article template
---
journal:
Title:
year:
Volume:
Location:
Pages:
tags:
doi:
finished reading:
UrL:
Type: published journal article
date added: "{{date:YYYY-MM-DD}}"
Authors:
synopsis:
cited by:
---

`thesis template
---
Title:
year:
Thesis type:
Location:
Pages:
tags:
doi:
finished reading:
UrL:
Type: thesis
date added: "{{date:YYYY-MM-DD}}"
Authors:
synopsis:
---

`report template
---
Title:
year:
Volume:
Rapport:
Location:
Pages:
tags:
doi:
finished reading:
UrL:
Type: report
date added: "{{date:YYYY-MM-DD}}"
Authors:
synopsis:
---

`conference proceedings template
---
Title:
year:
Location:
Pages:
tags:
doi:
finished reading:
UrL:
Type: conference proceedings
conference name:
date added: "{{date:YYYY-MM-DD}}"
Authors:
synopsis:
publisher:
---

In my literature vault my Author template is very minimal:

`author template
---
date added: "{{date:YYYY-MM-DD}}"
---
Author of:
-

However, in my main work vault my “People template” is much more comprehensive:

`person template
---
date added: "{{date:YYYY-MM-DD}}"
job title:
email:
phone:
Institution:
Department:
Unit:
URL:
image:
---
> [!info]+

Especially for researchers in a small field, where one will, sooner or later, meet most of the authors of the papers one is reading, it might be valuable to have more information about who the authors are, where they are based, and if there is a major unresolved and polarizing debate in the field, on which side they stand.

Note: These days my work Obsidian Vault notes for people I meet through work had links to their papers in my Literature vault using the “copy advanced URI” option, and pasting that as an external link. Now that I think of that, I should also have a link in the Obsidian authors notes that points to their note in my work Vault for those I have actually met…

Note also that I should go back and add “cited by” to the other templates, and perhaps a “cites”. In both of these (and in the Authors property, and in the “author of” section of the Authors notes) I use links back to the relevant note by typing a [[ and then a couple of letters of the relevant note and then clicking on the right suggestion.

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