How to read and take notes like a PhD - easy, fast, and efficient

create yourself a presentation that is probably the simplest and most effective way that I've been able to keep up with the literature read it take notes and here's the thing you don't have to read every single Paper in your field to become a PhD uh qualified expert the thing is is that you have to make sure that you are able to quickly go through the literature separate out what's good and what's not and for me just writing notes never worked I I've tried Excel documents I've tried different like online programs I've even just tried using my reference manager as a way to find stuff and it just never ever worked for me so this is my method for reading papers and taking notes so that I was able to find things when I needed it and that it helped me really navigate the new academic world that I was entering and here we go so the first thing I would do is grab myself a presentation sort of deck like this now this is Google Slides which is free to use but you don't have to use that I've also used Microsoft PowerPoint in the past as well whatever you feel comfortable with but here's the thing look here I have a templated um slide and what I want is the paper title the paper link the take-home messages any interesting figures or other notes and I write it here and look here is one of the most important things for actually sort of like going back to this and making it as user friendly as possible just simple tags down here now one thing that I've realized is that when I was going back over my sort of presentation that I made with all of the literature um sort of like jammed in it is that I needed a way to sort of like work out why I was looking at this particular paper and I found that it was only sort of like a handful of reasons why a certain Paper would be interesting so the first thing is literature review so are you using it as a basis to write a literature review just keep that tag in is it new discovery is it something that sparks my interest is it something that I want to tell people about in my group in my meeting with my supervisor I would use that Discovery tag the other one is must read now the thing is that every single research area has like the must read papers and so these were like the cornerstones if I felt like this was a paper that I could not sort of not read it would get tagged as that methods now method I would actually use if I came across a paper and I was like I want to do this this is a method that I want to use this is something I want to try but you can call it whatever you want like must do in the lab or must use for your research whatever you want and the last thing is an idea so is it an idea that is uh interesting to me right now is it an idea that I just want to sort of like you know mull over for a little bit so those were really the reasons why I was looking at the literature and so I made sure that these tags were in the bottom and all I really did was delete the ones that didn't make sense for the paper so you'll see how I use that in a moment but in the um in the special template that I made they all have to be in there okay let's go and grab some papers and see how this works Google Scholar is a place where I initially go now I also recommend going to elicit elicit is where you can go in and just add some sort of like simple questions but let's go old school the way I did it and have a look at Google Scholar what do we want to look at we want to have a look at um new materials for Nano dots let's have a look I have no idea what this is about but here we are these these are all the things let's have a look where rare earth meets carbon Nano dots all right I'm going to grab the PDF of this one thing I love to do is actually just split up like this so I have my cheat on one side my cheat sheet on one side and my paper on the other and that just makes it really easy to compare and see what's going on so obviously paper title first thing I want to do is do no don't want to delete it that was stupid well first thing I want to do is duplicate the slide so then I want to just grab this top bit we grab that we also grabbed the link to where you can actually get it take home message now this is where you have to skim the paper you look at the abstract and the conclusions and I just skim I'm not interested really in the details at this point I'm just looking to see if it can help me sort of uh answer some questions grab new methods uh spark some interest or maybe it's useful for my literature review let's check it out so here I will scan this let's do that I won't subject you to me actually doing it let's have a look to see what it says all right so essentially this is a review article it's going to talk about the um the synthetic strategies applications uh on all sorts and then they present current challenges so I know that I want to use this really as a literature review is something that will maybe help me kind of bring all things together it is a review article so I down here I'll make sure that it's a review tag so I'll remove everything other than the literature review tag and then take home message the take home message now can be sort of like summarized really easily I don't even want to do that myself these days because it's a bit boring so I'll take the entire thing and I'll head over to chatgpt and I'll say um turn it into three bullet points okay let's see what happens Rare Earth elements are widely used in illuminescence for magnetic fields but they're overboard performance and aqueous stability need to be improved carbon number dots are excellent Canario carers okay so I can take some of these and I can just copy and paste it across because ultimately this is my first pass I'm not interested in all of the details now that's a bit rubbish let's see if I can make that a bit better Pace without formatting done interesting figures now this is where I think this method really comes into its own because it is not something that I've seen other people do and so all I do is go through the paper and I'm looking for interesting um sort of like visual cues as to what the paper's about and why I'm actually wood went to review it in the future so here uh systematic yeah that's kind of good but it's not good enough maybe I want to take a picture of some of these people not today but let's have a look okay that's talking about stuff now this is interesting a schematic illustration of a certain process so maybe that's interesting to me so using my browser which is Vivaldi which I really love I'll go across and I'll just copy and paste that into my document and you can see there that I've got then a little representation of the sorts of things that it talks about there may be other things in there that are interesting there may be some tables there may be some really sort of like complicated things that I want to sort of put in but really it's just what stands out to me now to be honest with you in a review article there's so much that I won't put much in but it will just show me the sorts of illustrations that um that are in there and it will help me as well just sort of like uh have a visual representation of what's in that paper so we'll see if we can find something that isn't a review articles okay new now let's have a look to see what this one's about so once again I'm going to head over to my template I'm going to go and duplicate slide and that is essentially how I'm going to have a look at the different uh papers so I'm going to go in here let's copy that let's go in here let's copy and paste that there we are so paper link I'm going to grab the entire link up here but you can also sort of like just take whatever link makes sense okay that's a little that's crazy that link but you get the idea as long as we can find it again that's all that matters um take home message so once again now I'm going to review the main abstract okay these are the sort of words I'm looking for in this present study and then it's actually going to tell me what this study is about so in this present study all right good so this is good for me this tells me what they've done I'm going to copy and paste this go across to chat GPT that's what it's called and paste that in and then I'm going to say um oh no okay some summarize uh oh okay it's it's already doing it it's doing it for me great it's it actually knows that I want a summary which is kind of weird um but these These are the take-home messages carbon number dots were sent to the dot sensitized it tells me the average size um it tells me the compatibility and the dots were found to have free radical Scavenging properties okay well that's interesting to me so that's what I want that's what I want to see in here so let's go in take home message go down and paste that in but we're going to paste it without formatting okay now interesting figures let's go through and see if we've got any interesting figures in here so we've got uh what happened we've got all of this stuff that's okay well this now is starting to look interesting to me this is also interesting to me uh this is the reduction assay uh quantitative assay for cellular okay so let's have a look now maybe I want this one this this is the kind of image that will be the most interesting for me so I'm going to copy that capture it and then it's going to go into my presentation so what is it that is about this uh this this one that I like so this is a new method for me or ideas so I'm going to keep the tags as method or ideas and that's it really that's my process and I do that for as many articles as I need to and as you can see it's probably taking me just like two or three minutes per article but really this is the first pass this is nothing crazy if I do anything more um I will spend hours wasting time on papers that maybe aren't useful to me so by doing this when I first start a project I build up a huge Bank of knowledge and resources I can go back through and have a look at okay one thing that I think is really important is that once you've got like hundreds in here sometimes it can be hundreds all you have to do is go here and go control find and then find in your document whatever you want so if you are looking for methods you can go through and say well I actually want all of the methods stuff so let's go have a look okay well here's a method that maybe I want to do in my research and you've got a link to the paper you've got the take home message to refresh yourself and then we go on to the second stage so you build out this magical document for yourself and the one thing I love about it is that it allows you to quickly go through in presentation mode so if we go to slideshow mode the one thing I absolutely love about this so there's obviously the uh the template but you go through and you can say was it carbon was it that figure that I remember no was it this figure no was it okay well maybe it was this one that I care about and so you just flick through and I love this kind of quick flicking action it really appear feels to me rather than sort of like scrolling endlessly down an Excel document or a notion uh kind of page it just completely makes more intuitive sense to me um and if I can find things much quicker as long as I tag them I use the appropriate kind of take-home messages and I I'm very visual I guess and so I do remember oh you know the paper with the weird diagram rather than what was actually kind of written and so this is just such a great way to have all of your uh literature review in one spot how to take notes on it and how to find it really really easily afterwards but of course it doesn't stop there because we're just skimming this is the first stage of how to read as a PhD student this is like the filtering stage next we have to actually go and read the paper in detail reading the paper in detail is very important now there is no trick to this you cannot simply paste this into an AI tool because as I've shown in my other video go check it out here AI doesn't catch some of the most important things about papers at the moment so we do have to go down to taking notes and printing out the paper now you don't have to print it out but I find that if I have it on my computer I'm reading it as a PDF I don't read it like I actually should so I do print it off so let's print off this bad boy right now [Music] here it is on my desk I would have loads and loads of printed out papers because I don't think there's any shortcut to reading it uh not in full but at least reading the abstract conclusions and whatever else interests you in this paper and all I would do is write on the paper um exactly what I wanted I would use red or green or something that stood out I didn't tend to use highlighters highlighting is a weird thing for me but yeah I'd go through and I just read it and then if there was something that stood out I would underline it and I'd write notes in the in the sections along you know in all the blank spaces and so it's really as simple as that and like I said there is no shortcut so you have to sit down and you have to give this paper if it's interesting to you sometime and it may only be 5 min kids but you do have to give it a bit more time than that simple sort of first pass so what are you actually using this paper for if it's methods so if I go here and have a look at the methods if this was something that was interesting me so I would go and try to find the method section which I'm hoping is in here it should be in here where are you okay here we've got the materials and methods so the materials and methods is huge let's have a look I want to have a look at the synthesis and characterization of carbon dots that's exactly what I want to do now so briefly 50 grams of date molasses was dissolved in blah blah so here we are this is what I would want so I take a little pen and I'd say okay this section is what I want to do methods and you know what if I don't write on any of the pages I don't have to actually keep this as it is like I can get rid of all of these papers I would only actually ever keep the pages that were interesting to me because the rest of it is just kind of filler in that sense once you've identified what is truly useful for you so I would keep this page and I'd make sure that I could actually read the uh the citation which is down here and if I didn't have the front page maybe I take a note of the title on top but ultimately that was it and then I'd have a selection of two read papers on one side of my desk and the single Pages or the couple of pages that I found interesting from each uh Journal article on another section of my desk and that's really how I organize things now you can do this in a more digital fashion maybe I'm a little bit old school when it comes to printing it out um but I did print out nearly every article that I really wanted details from is the only way that I could really get the information into my brain and just sort of like having this material section as soon as this material section was written in my lab book there was no reason for me to keep this anymore so I would get rid of it you know that you just have to sort of like Be Clever about what you do keep and don't keep and people get overwhelmed because they print off loads of stuff and never get through it so that's why it's important to have that first pass with your literature review you can flick through it quickly you can go back to it as often as you want refresh it and also feel free to have an A different kind of presentation for each section of your research you may have multiple projects and you may not have complete overlap so have different literature files and presentations for each section I would do that if I started a new paper for example I'd say okay this is for the high high uh throughput paper and therefore here's everything I want to go in into that paper here's all of the literature and I'd copy and paste slides from other sections and it just worked for me so that is how I did it as a PhD student and postdoctoral researcher and maybe it will be your favorite way too so there we have it there's everything you need to know about how to read and take notes as a PhD student and researcher I found that this was the best method for me I really didn't like the Excel documents I really didn't like just using my reference manager like mendeley this was the way it worked for me it was quick it was much more Visual and it allowed me to um really sort of like get to grips with a certain field very very quickly even if I had had nothing to do with it in the past so let me know in the comments if that works for you let me know in the comments your tricks and there are more ways that you can interact with me the first way is to head over to my newsletter where you'll get five emails over about two weeks everything from the tools I use the podcast I been on how to write the perfect abstract and more it's exclusive content available for free so go sign up now there's also academiainsider.com that's where I have my two ebooks the ultimate academic writing toolkit as well as the PHD Survival Guide I also have what I also have the forums there there's a Blog it's going off and it's all to make sure that Academia works for you all right then I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Andy Stapleton

Views: 376,973

Keywords: andrew stapleton, andy stapleton, andy stapleton literature review, how i take notes, how to make notes, how to read, how to read and take notes like a phd student, how to read like a phd, how to read like a phd student, how to read research papers, how to take note, how to take notes, how to take notes effectively, literature review, note taking, notes, phd, phd student, phd student life, read like a phd, read like phd, take notes, taking notes

Id: GrC2vS9j30g

Length: 18min 31sec (1111 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 28 2023