What is a Literature Note?

Knowledge management
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Hey, everyone. I’ve been writing up these short lil primers as addendums to the zettelkasten course I’m teaching. Here’s one of the more recent ones. Original post is here. The full text is below. Happy to answer any questions. And, always happy to receive comments and feedback.

What is a Literature Notes

  • A literature note is a single note containing references to all the interesting passages in a book (or other piece of media) that you encounter.
  • A literature note is one of the resources you will use to create zettels.

Ahrens’ literature note is what many zettelers call a reference or bibliographic note. Personally, I prefer the term “reference note,” as that’s both what it is and what it’s for: referencing.

A reference note is a single doc containing all the interesting ideas that caught your attention while reading a book (listening to a podcast or watching a documentary, etc). These very brief mentions are listed in the order they were captured, each with a page number and, if so desired, a tag or topical reference.

A reference note might look like this:

Ahrens, S. (2017). How to Take Smart Notes. 
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

13 reference to speed writing (effort)
14 trying to squeeze too much (squeeze)
15 no effort (effort)
18 ref to bibliography (lit note)
20 index ref (index)
21 need only make a few changes (effort)
24 discrepancies btw lit/perm (perm)

As you can see above, reference note captures are brief jots intended to remind you of what you found interesting. These are not fully developed ideas or lengthy unpackings of a concept. These are, as the name suggests, references to what caught your attention.

Reference notes are not zettels. At some point during or after the process of capturing interesting ideas from your source, you will create individual zettels (what Ahrens calls both “permanent notes” and “the main notes in the slip-box”) based on what of your captures you are currently interested in working on or think might be interesting to work on later.

It’s important to note, however, that not everything you capture need become a zettel. Just because an idea caught your attention during your first pass, does not mean that the idea deserves to be incorporated into the main compartment of your slip-box just yet. Feel free to make as many or as few zettels off of the captures in your reference note, knowing that you can always come back to the reference note later.

This is why Ahrens rightfully describes the literature/reference note as “permanent,” because it is permanently stored in your zettelkasten. It will serve you as both an index of the media source, as well as a source of inspiration for future zettels.

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Thanks for sharing these insights @bobdoto!!! I especially appreciate your example snippet from a reference note because it makes things more concrete. I’m assuming the parentheticals in your snippet are the “topical reference” that you mention just above.

A few questions:

  1. When reading something for the first time, in an area a bit outside of your area of expertise, do you have a process for generating these topic parentheticals? Since you have them as parentheticals and not links, I assume they are not existing notes. Do they come from the source or from your own knowledge?
  2. Do you have an example of how you might note something interesting from a graph or table in your reference note? It sometimes takes me a few minutes of staring at a complicated table or graph(s) to figure out what’s interesting; do you have a way to capture that and help reduce that figuring out effort in future times?
  3. I can imagine how to adapt your listing of page number to something like section-subsection when page isn’t precise enough (e.g. scientific paper with many words per “page”). Such papers often do a lot of referring forwards to future sections for further explanation: do you have a way of capturing things you hope future sections will answer in a way that’s visible when you finally get to those future sections?
  4. Do you ever record things like “I feel like this conflicts with what they said back in some page I don’t remember in chapter 2”? What does that end up looking like in your reference note?
  5. For some references, it’s helpful for me to record some very high-level thoughts. “I really liked this paper because xyz but colleague A didn’t like it because jkl” or “totally lost after section 1, had to give up” - do those end up in your reference note or somewhere else?

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts!

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Great questions.

  1. If I’m capturing something, it’s probably relevant to something I’m interested in. So, I’d just put whatever topic I mostly associated the capture with.
  2. Not really. Some things just take time to make sense of. But, you can still capture the reference anyway. The whole point is to give you something to refer back to later on. So, capture what’s interesting, and go back later when you think you have something to say about it. At that point, make a zettel.
  3. You can put whatever demarcations are helpful for you. Sometimes I write “(bott)” for bottom of page, etc. Or you could write “33/2” meaning page 33 second paragraph. Etc.
  4. I don’t, but I certainly could.
  5. They might. I’d just put them at the top of the page/note. Whatever might help you in the future.

Thanks for taking the time to read the piece. :slight_smile:

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It’s an interesting point of view about literature notes @bobdoto and I’m glad you shared it here. Could you give some thoughts about how you would use such a reference note in future? Maybe you can shade some light in my understanding here, which would be highly appreciated.
When I had read the book of Ahrends, my understanding of a literature note was a note, which is written in the context of the author. And it’s written in such a way, that also after 10 years the original literature isn’t needed to understand the idea. Means it’s translated in your own metamodel of speach so you can use and understand it in future without looking at the origin text.
Your example of a reference note reminds me as a fleeting note, which helps to remember what you have read about and decide later (short time, maybe same day) what of this take into your zettelkasten and what to through away. But it seems you are using it completly differently.
What troubles me is, when I would return to such an example above some month/years later, I would have just some highlights, which maybe in the context of the book gives me an idea what it was about. To get the idea, I would need to reread this book section and make up my mind again, wouldn’t I?

If I’m following your thoughts further, all notes which can stand alone for all time without following the reference for understanding are permanent notes? Do you write them in the context from the originating author or always only in your own context? Is there then at all a difference between own ideas and ideas taken from literature in the permanent notes?

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“To get the idea, I would need to reread this book section and make up my mind again, wouldn’t I?”

Yeah, you might. But, so what? years later, you’ll be a different person, and it might serve you well to reread some sections to see if you still feel the same way.

There’s no reason you can’t or shouldn’t go back to the original source (the book) after you take notes on or from it. That’s just a made up metric by people who use note-taking as a pissing contest. I don’t use that metric at all, unless it’s a book I don’t own (from the library) or when I don’t have access to the source online for some reason. Going back to a book or source to clarify, get additional context, or gain a new insight is just something we do. No need to worry about that.

As for how Luhmann took notes when reading, here’s him talking about it:

“I make a note with the bibliographic information. On the back, ‘page so-and-so is this and that, page so-and-so is this and that’, and then it later goes into the bibliographic box, where I record all the things I’ve read bibliographically… When I’m reading, I have a piece of paper on which I always write, page 13, this and that; 25, this and that. On the back are the bibliographical information, and later I can see what I noticed while reading it.” (Luhmann, Archimedes und wir interviews)

This bibliographic note Luhmann is referring to is what Ahrens calls a literature note. Here’s Ahrens describing the literature note in relation to Luhmann:

“Whenever [Luhmann] read something, he would write the bibliographic information on one side of a card and make brief notes about the content on the other side. These notes would end up in the bibliographic slip-box” (Ahrens, 18)

Now, you don’t have to do it this way. But, if you’re wondering where the idea comes from, and what Ahrens is talking about, this is it.

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thanks for this further explanation. This helps me to get your point and yes, I remember to have read from this. Luhmann had so to say two slip box systems. The bibliographic one and the one in which he put his thoughts. So the literature/bibliographic note is then only the reference to some source of information with just the necessary amount of information what this source is about. Maybe some keywords or few sentences.
The permanent notes are then the thoughts about this topics and just linking to it to establish the origin what triggered the thought. So it would be perfectly fine to have all parts from one literature on one note and just linking to it’s sections if needed. You are right for sure, my understanding evolves and rereading it could bring new aspects and thoughts. So maybe after all it would make not so much a difference if I don’t remember everything when reading my note to it what was in the book. I guess then it’s more relevant that I write my own thoughts in such quality down so I can still understand it when coming across it after long time. Then my thoughts about this section, may it a summary of my understanding or extended with further thoughts to it is not anymore part of the literature note but already the permanent note.
Thanks @bobdoto, you helped me with your post a lot. I wondered about this topic for quite a while.

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