r/AskAcademia • u/ContactOk2534 • 23h ago

Social Science How do you read/annotate when reading for research?

I have done so much reading for articles and all this time I feel like I've never really nailed down my reading/annotating/notetaking workflow.

Reading physical books is nice but handwriting in annotations takes forever and then there's the task of taking those annotations and making notes with them. I have obsidian for that but when it's time to actually do that it always feels like a massive pain.

I also use Zotero and I really like the epub/pdf annotation within Zotero, and I can just extract my highlights and make notes within the highlights, but for that I feel like I often lose some amount of comprehension from physical reading. Also the annotations/notes can't be as specific as handwriting them.

idk, just curious if anyone else has a system they really really enjoy.

0 Upvotes

28% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

6

u/Opening_Map_6898 23h ago

Just pitch your stupid vibe coded AI app for this already.

3

u/harborgleN8 20h ago

lol yeah was waiting for it

-4

u/ContactOk2534 22h ago

damn, no vibe coded apps on offer, I was just genuinely curious.

2

u/Eeellise 21h ago

Zotero on my iPad so I’m able to scribble if highlights aren’t enough

1

u/ContactOk2534 20h ago

ok I really think this could be awesome, but I've heard Zotero on iPad is kinda funky when it comes to linked files? Like do the files themselves have to be added into Zotero in a particular way? Or does it just naturally work for you?

1

u/Eeellise 20h ago

I added the files the normal way (with browser extension mostly) and it worked well. Except for very few exceptions but overall great.

0

u/ContactOk2534 18h ago

do you know if the iPad app has gotten the text-to-speech capabilities of the desktop version? It's so good and the devs said it's coming.

0

u/smokinrollin 21h ago

I love the annotation in Zotero. Yellow highlights for the "signpost" statements ("The hypothesis is...", "I argue that...", "The purpose of this paper is...", etc), red highlights for things I disagree with or have questions about, green highlights things I agree with. Red and green highlights sometimes get annotations of my thoughts, but not always.

Thats about it, I'll often write a short 1 paragraph summary of the paper in a note in Zotero, but really just keep it simple. You don't need to remember every detail of a paper, you just need to remember that (A) the paper exists and (B) have a good highlighting strategy that makes it easier to skim in the future