Title: How you keep research notes clean when source change later?

Help
1

Hi everyone,

I have one small problem with my workflow.

Sometimes I make many notes from PDF files, presentations and articles. Everything looks good in beginning, but after some weeks I find the original source is updated or I want to add more information.

Now my notes become little messy because I don’t know which note need update and which one is already latest.

I try using tags and links between notes but after many files it is still confusing.

How you manage this in Obsidian?

Do you have any workflow for keeping research notes updated without checking every note manually?

Maybe I am missing some simple idea.

Would like to know how other people handle this.

2

You may want to elaborate a bit with a few (could be “fictive”) examples. It is not clear what your note taking strategy is, and what you consider as “original source is updated” (content? refernce to it?), and how you update your notes (with the updated content). It is therefore difficult to make suggestions.

As a general recommandation, note-taking is not about hoarding information (i.e. copy paste), but rather about your own conceptual thinking on the material. Detail should not make it in your notes. They always should contain the reference to the original document, so you can always look up up-to-date details anytime and from any related note if the need arises.

3

This method isn’t refined because I use it infrequently, but it has worked, and its concepts might be useful.

set-up

An article note is my vault’s sole direct reference to an article. It contains article metadata and nothing more.

Related Information like quotes and commentary are in other notes that link to the article note. These notes have properties that can help a base rule-in or rule-out their inclusion for updates. (example below)

Any information used in more than one note is kept as—or made into—a single source of truth that can be retrieved with an embed of a complete note, an embed of a block from a note, or a formula. That way, changing the content in any note always updates that content everywhere it is referenced.

process

When Zotero’s Retraction Watch integration flags an update, I add an hasUpdate property to my article note:

---
title: Analysis of womp rat vocalizations
DOI: 10.1000/001
## etc.
recordOf:
  - "[[articles]]"
hasUpdate: true
---

This automatically adds a set of tasks to my to-review base.

For example, a quote note like:

---
componentOf: "[[Analysis of womp rat vocalizations]]"
recordOf:
  - "[[quotes]]"
---

Womp womp womp.

… would show up in the to-review base by way of being a quote of an article that currently has an update.

A different note that happens to link to the article but has no component or analysis relationship wouldn’t show up in the to-review base.

Once I review a note, I click its upToDate checkbox property. This removes the note from the to-review base. (For a shortcut, I use the base to click it, as it probably didn’t pre-exist in the note.)

Upon reviewing all notes of interest, I can delete the hasUpdate property from the article note.

Done.

I also like to mass delete the related upToDate properties, just to mop up. After all, up-to-date is every note’s default stance.

Optionally, when I want to continue referring to an outdated version of something (article, component, original writing, etc.), I make a version note, link to it where relevant, and record its version-relationship in its properties.

---
versionOf: "[[quoth the womp rat]]"
versionNote: retained for discussion of quote that originally appeared on page 2
---

Womp omp omp.

… where “quoth the womp rat.md” is a quote note that is a component of the article note.

That enables a single base to show all of an article’s versions, components, and components’ versions as well as their embedded locations.