System for taking and organising reading notes

Posted by Lucas
Dec 6, 2011 at 05:03 AM

Great discussion! I’m also pursuing a PhD and am an inveterate outliner (and “CRIMP-er”), so I can relate to all the points raised so far. I’ve been thinking about a lot of the same questions, but, not surprisingly, I have yet to come up with a clear solution. A few disjointed thoughts on where I’m at:

—For references, I keep coming back to Zotero, which I love, even although it falls short in terms of analytics and note management (no hierarchical outlining). Citavi has some great features, but Zotero fits my style better, and I like that it is cross-platform and now fully web-accessible. Also, I have more confidence that Zotero will continue and I’ll generally have an easier time getting my references out of it in the future. (Plus more possibilities for sync with hand-helds and the like.)

—For notes, I seem to keep coming back to Tinderbox, although sometimes I find myself switching to OneNote because I want to draw freehand diagrams, add photos/scans of handwritten notes, and so forth. Tinderbox has powerful analytics capabilities, although once I’m done my research (see below), I may try out some of the dedicated analytics packages as well. My guess is that Tinderbox will do the trick though.

—Right now, I’m doing anthropological field research, so I’ve been thinking a lot about various methods of capture. I’ve tried Dragon for transcription of audio notes and OneNote for recognition of handwriting, and it looks like I’ll be receiving a LiveScribe pen over the holidays. Right now everything is still a mess.

Concluding thought: I must confess I love OneNotes intrinsic outlining (“one-pane” style, so to speak) and its powerful incorporation of media, handwriting and drawing. I would love to see some sort of software that had base like OneNote but that also included good reference management and powerful saved-searching and filtering. In the long run, although I see Tinderbox and InfoQube as contenders, I actually see Zotero as the most likely candidate in terms of something that could mature into such an ideal research tool. But as many here have pointed out in the past, a mix of dedicated tools can also be preferable, so I’ll just keep bumbling along for now.

(Sorry for the not very well-wrought post.)