how i find papers
finding papers is sometimes the most difficult thing to do. I use research rabbit to find papers, as well as various social media platforms like twitter, but that’s becoming more rare. I follow a bunch of non-neuro scientists or non-stem academics whose work I enjoy reading and engaging with.
google scholar can also be useful to find papers. I mainly use it if I know an author of a paper but not the article title, or want to read papers from one specific lab.
how i keep track of papers
I use zotero to manage my references. Inside my zotero library I have 2 folders: “papers” & “archive”. any paper I save to my zotero library is initially put into papers. this is my “to read” folder. once I read them, they get moved to “archive”.
how i consume papers
there are so many ways to read papers and it all depends on your intention or goals. Here are a couple ways I approach the act of reading papers:
- read papers closely
- read papers quickly
- dumit styles of reading
- the three pass approach to read papers
how i take notes on papers
I only take notes if I read papers closely. I usually have the pdf open in zotero on one half of my screen and obsidian open on the other half of the screen to take literature notes.
Once I import the paper to obsidian, I begin with my fleeting notes. there’s no rule what goes here, just whatever is useful to process info from the paper. often, there will be clear ideas that come up in these fleeting notes that would make a good modular note. if my fleeting notes make it into their own modular note, I try to keep a link to that new modular note somewhere in the literature note.
I like to add figures to help clarify and contextualize when I take modular notes (and its useful to add a short caption in the notes about the figure). To do this, I use the rectangle tool in zotero to draw around the specific panel. I can then import the paper again to obsidian and the image will be saved in my attachments/ folder, and should show up in the literature note. highlighting works the same way (see my template file in take literature notes).