5.5: Take Notes

Note Taking

I’ve been most successful in my research when I read and take notes on separate days. Waiting overnight keeps from regurgitating what I read - instead, ideas simmer in the background of my mind, and I’m more likely to write patterns rather than just copying words. But when you do it is up to you - do what fits into your schedule.

To make your notes help you focus on synthesizing, and to help you when you're writing later, I recommend organizing your notes in the following template:

Note-Taking Template

Article Citation:

Title  - 

• Title -
• Author(s) - 
• Date - 
• Source - 

Patterns & notes

Pattern	Notes (include page numbers!!)

Reflection:

 

Next Steps:

 

 

Explanation 

Article citation 

It's not important for this to be correctly formatted here. You'll use a citation management tool to generate your citations for your paper, later. Just jot down:

• Title
• Author(s)
• Date

Pattern

At first, don't worry too much about finding the "right" patterns. We'll talk more about this in the next section. Just notice what stands out.

Patterns might include:

• Source type: What types of sources are represented? Research studies, reviews, theoretical pieces, commentaries?
• Method: If research studies, what methodologies have been used? Think primary versus secondary; quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods
• Population: Who has been studied? Consider ages, demographic characteristics, etc., particularly as it relates to your interest.
• Location: Where were studies conducted? Urban v suburban v rural, state-focused, US-focused, globally-focused
• When were studies published? Has this been studied recently? Or was it studied previously and there is a lull in the research?
• What themes/topics are discussed? Aka what research questions did studies seek to answer?
• Definitions: Are there terms that the research could define differently? If the term is in the DSM-5, a definition isn't useful in the literature review. Instead, perhaps you're researching how faith impacts college students resiliency in their first year. Do the sources you found define faith? If so, how? If not, that's worth noting, too.
• What’s missing that you expect to see?

Notes

Every note you take should, ideally, correspond to a pattern. Perhaps you’re noting something about the methodology or population. You could note those simply as “method” or as you get further along and know what you’ve been finding, perhaps you note “survey”. Then the notes might be how useful the survey was. For population, you might note “population” as the pattern, or you might use your interest as the pattern.

Watch Scribbr's YouTube video about how to identify themes.

Scribbr. (2020 April 23). Identify themes and gaps in literature - with REAL examples. [video] YouTube (3:24)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMGdwIhiwzU

Try to paraphrase as much as you can, but if a quote is particularly salient, copy it in full. But be sure to add the page numbers!

Reflection 

This should be short. It’s just a quite note to yourself about how useful the source was. If it’s not useful, why not? And also, if it doesn’t seem useful, hopefully you didn’t write too many notes!

Next steps

You don’t have to complete this. But if you find a new term, you could write it down to later use it in a database to find more sources. Or perhaps the article gave you a new direction to shift your topic. Or the article made you question something and you want to check with your faculty member about it, or maybe to ask a friend or parent about something it connects for you. Maybe you want to remember to find the full text of some of the article’s citations.

The point of the next steps is to remember what you’ll want to do after you finish this step. And this step is to read all of the 5-10 sources. Using the metaphor of stepping stones, we’re on one stone right now. If you start leaping off to another stone, things could get unwieldy and you’ll land in the water. Stay focused just on this step for now, and put any ideas into the next steps.

I type my notes, but you can print out the template and hand write instead. When I type, my notes are never more than a page and a half, but usually much less than a page. If it gets any longer, it won’t help you when you need to synthesize to write your paper later.

Example: Note Taking \(\PageIndex{1}\)

Continuing my example topic of graduate students + research + affect, here are the notes I took for a helpful source:

Note - I purposefully type each element myself, rather than copying and pasting a full citation from a citation generator. This forces me to think about the authors, the source, and the year. Later, when I'm writing, I use a citation management tool (e.g. Zotero) to generate the final citations in APA or whatever the journal requires).

Citation

• Author: Cahoy & Schroeder
• Year: 2012
• Title: embedding affective learning outcomes in library instruction
• Source: Communications in Information Literacy

Notes

Pattern	Notes
Definition	Affective domain “a person’s attitudes, emotions, interests, motivation, self-efficacy, and values” (quote from Schroeder & Cahoy, 2008, p. 129
Prior research scant	Still more research on cognitive than affective
Motivation	Affect involves more than emotions - includes motivation!
Population	Seems to be undergrads - does not specify to grad students

Reflection

Very helpful, esp lit review in finding more articles. Also, very helpful survey of librarians teaching/assessing affective components. Helpful to start getting a definition of the various components of affective, including more than emotions.

Next Steps

• Find Shroeder & Cahoy original source, and also their 2010 article.
• Find Mellon articles: 86 & 88
• Try using terms “affective domain”, motivation, values, self-efficacy

In Practice 

Activity: Take notes \(\PageIndex{1}\)

1. Replicate the template above in MS Word or Google Docs. Save it as a template.
2. If you prefer handwriting notes, print several copies of the template for yourself. Otherwise, copy the template into a new file.
3. Complete the template for each of the sources you've already scanned and read.

Next Steps:

Now that you have some idea of a few of the sources written on your topic, in the next section, we'll discuss how to deepen your understanding of how these sources connect to each other & to your topic.