How to Read, Take Notes On and Understand Journal Articles | Essay Tips
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- čas přidán 4. 07. 2024
- The first pilot to my Essay Tips series! I share my method for reading and understanding a journal article or paper quickly and efficiently including how to take good, concise notes and remember useful citations.
If your method differs from mine or you think you can give me some pointers then let me know in the comments!
This is the first in a series of videos I'm hoping to produce while undertaking my PhD at the University of Exeter on tips for students at university or college whether undergraduate, postgraduate or otherwise.
Note: The programme to the left (which I highlight in) is Mendeley. Apologies for forgetting to state this in the video!!
If you've enjoyed this video then please do check out the rest of my channel. I generally put out new videos every Tuesday and Friday discussing theatre and playwriting from the perspective of an aspirant and (some might say) emerging playwright, theatre maker and academic.
My tagging system was borrowed from this article on The Thesis Whisperer: thesiswhisperer.com/2015/10/2...
Further Reading
The Academic Skills Handbook by Diana Hopkins and Tom Reid
US: amzn.to/2NBDAnf
UK: amzn.to/2NBJIfb
The Study Skills Handbook by Stella Cottrell
US: amzn.to/2NDeIvh
UK: amzn.to/2OTyneu
[The above are affiliate links. I receive a small kickback from anything you buy which, in turn, helps to support the channel.] - Zábava
Thanks for watching everyone! A bunch more of my Essay Tips videos can be found here: czcams.com/play/PLIVcDWpMT7KfEYHOg54Lk6Wy-cyhkR84Z.html
Hi Tom! I have a question..how do you make possible to have open the article together with marked text together with Evernote? Is it all connected with Evernote or the article is open independently from Evernote? I do not know if I am clear with that.. :) however, thanks in advance!
great, this vid should be 10M+ view! Cheers mate
So, I use the "absolute chaos" method. It includes finding way too many cool sources that may or may not include a single sentence that is crucial for my papers and which I will frantically try to remember when I actually need it.
😂🤣this made my smile thank you
Lol it’s worked well for me
ah the ADD method, yes it's killing me atm
wait who taught you my method?!
I am SO glad I'm not alone!!
I like when someone have a smiley face and explain same time.
Haha, I always find it helps to at least look like I'm enjoying what I'm talking about!
@@Tom_Nicholas HELP what tips do you have for hkw to keep reading papers so it is not boring and discouraging and depressing? Papers arent engaging like comic books or novels or fiction books..it really sucks..why cant they be like that..I hope you can respond when you can.
this was actually sooo helpful coz as someone who's been an undergrad for just three weeks and knows nil about this ish i was close to having a breakdown before finding this
Who is actually searching videos on how to study instead of actually studying lol 🙈
I am doing it, I actually starts to get bore when I read an article so start to search, what is the best of method of reading :D
Kimberly Aldunate me unfortunately
THis is part of my beating-procrasting-method obviously, therefore responding to your comment is also very significant for my study. Anyways, have a lovely day, i am gonna cry now
Lol you also in the same boat, cause you wouldn't comment here if you had an idea of actually just study.
Smart people who are looking to improve their cognitive skills. Obviously that's not you Kim.
Using Evernote and preemptively writing your citations is actually a huge tip! I've spent way too much time at the 11th hour trying to get my references sorted. 😓
pastelink.net/1ejkb Read the The Writing Center
You can also use zotero and mendley for the citation and bibliography generation.
Hey, Microsoft Word has an in-put citation sorting! And it does your bibliography too! I can't recommend it enough
Use bibliographic management softwares like EndNote, Zotero, or Mendeley to organize your references.
sooooooo many thanks to your sharing! I feel so lucky that I found your channel at the beginning of my senior year! This is life-saving!!!
No worries Xueyan, hope you've found some of the videos helpful! And I hope your studies are going well!
We social scientists in so much trouble keeping in mind the articles. As an undergraduate psychology student, it will help me a lot! Thank you📚
Dear Tom,
thank you very much for sharing and explaining your effective way of reading articles with us in a simple 5-minute video. This is such a useful time-saver method that we all can apply, we really appreciate you!!
All the best,
That's so useful Tom! Especially the parts about highlighting the text and how you take notes in Evernote. Been using Mendeley to get the citations right and downloading PDFs, just to avoid typos when copying them. Would love more tips, your entire playlist is so helpful!
:)
ma guy!! thanks I actually felt a bit overwhelmed few minutes ago but seeing this kinda shed some hope - best way to get where you going is to get started, that's my psychological sense kicking in. I couldn't figure out which is the best way to take notes 🥳.
Oooh my. You are heaven sent! I have two weeks to submit a 3000 word report😭. I have been doubting whether I'm doing the right thing in terms of sourcing information. Many thanks to you❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️. I feel confident to get a lot of work done this week!
The idea with writing down the full reference line is so good. I have no idea why I never do this. Good reason to start now.
your joy and excitement for Essay tips made this video for me
This is JUST what I've been looking for. Thank you very much from Brazil! 🇧🇷
Thanks Tom! I've just finished my first semester of uni and have found reading and digesting journal articles a bit of challenge - this method should help put me on the right track!
This has been particularly helpful as I'm writing the literature review for a research proposal, thank you so much!!
I love this! It's so helpful and it works for any stage of an academic career. Some academic writing teachers could actually use some of these tips to improve their courses.
If *Ramsey Snow* would have pursued a career in literature instead of torturing people xD
That would've been a very different series...
"Use people as my notebooks"
This is 2 years old but I want you to know that I laughed out loud
Very useful! Please keep videos of this type coming! Very useful for those like me starting off and not having clue how to systemize and simplify the process of academic writing :)
Great video! I certainly do the highlighting but I need to improve on my note taking process, I'll try your method, thanks!
Thanks for taking your time to share with us those awesome note taking methods that makes learning very easy and enjoyable. Thank you
No worries at all, I’m really glad you think so!
Love your simplicity and re-introducing me to Evernote!
I teach College English Composition, and I've found that my syllabus is really lacking when it comes to HOW to actually do the heavy work of research, so I think this will be really helpful to share with my students. Thanks!
Hi Tom,
Yay! I am happy that I found your channel. I've been looking for this such technical sharing. Good to know how other people doing in 'technical' part of PhD like organising journal articles, reviewing literature, note taking, writing research paper, etc. Not so many people share their methods and I'm glad I found yours.
Just subscribed and looking forward for more updates!
cheers
Hey Nurul! I'm glad you found it too and hope it's in some way useful during your studies! Let me know if there's anything in particular you'd like me to do a video about!
yeah it s the famous questions we doctorat students have ,is my methode of reading suficient are other effictive methodes been used by others that i may learn and use is my methode too time taking ,how can i read with effeciency by taking notes and extracting the necessary info all by taking less time possible ... its good to see our other friends from phd sharing thiers
+Amr Del Yeah, I think I've finally (after a year) become fairly settled on my method but I still look at my colleagues' and wonder whether they've cracked it better than me!
This was very helpful, thank you! I have been looking for a more streamlined way of taking notes while reading, and this technique is perfect. I especially appreciate the tip to place the article citation at the top of the notes for future reference.
Aaye, nice to see a fellow Knight here.
Tom's video about jote taking and putting the citations at the top is pretty useful. Another thing that I've read that has revolutionized the way I read stuff and took notes would be Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Dorean's book _How To Read A Book_ . Despite it's title, it's one of the most insightful and enlightening books that I've ever read, because it taught me how to read deeper, how to approach reading different types of work , and subsequently how to take better notes on the books that I read, whether it's fiction or non-fiction. I definitely recommend it if you haven't already.
It was through reading that that I also developed my own Note Taking method using notebooks and multi colored gel pens. When I'm studying something and taking notes on it, I like to use 6 different types of color ink so it spices up the look of my notes rather than looking like the same black ink color throughout and it makes going back through the notes much quicker and easier. The sort of Coloring Ink Legend that I use is this:
Blue- Titles/Sections
Black- Normal Notes
Red- Special Terms/Quotes
Green- Personal Thoughts
Orange (with multicolor)- Drawings/Illustrations/Mind Maps/Graphs, etc.
Purple- Summary at the end
.
But yeah, what are your note taking techniques?
Nice and clear, I will show this to my students. They have been asking me to do feedback and commentary of examples. I have drawn inspiration from you and now have givven live commentary and feedback on real student literature reviews, I made them for my lectures but now rerecorded them for CZcams and now made them accessible. Good luck on your journey - Dr Egan
I recently discovered your channel. And I must say you are amazing!!Thanks for all the amazing tips
Super energizing and inspiring love ur seriousness,man
ahhh ive been so impressed by the amount of research you do in your videos so wanted to know how you trained to do so, lo and behold, your oldest video!
I stumbled across your channel by accident. I am doing my MBA and this is really helpful. Great video. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you for the video. After taking a gap year and suddenly plunging into higher level courses, I'm finding myself swimming in readings without much guidance with how to go about with them. Great video!
Glad you found it useful Celina and best of luck with your studies!
So brief and straight to the point 👍🏾
I'm actually preparing to go back to school. Thank you for the tips!
love the choice of background music.
Well there are some neat ideas there! Going to steal this method. Thank You!
+Rufus Mosis Thanks Rufus! Happy to be of help!
It's really helpful! Especially for someone who's struggling w his thesis proposal...
I used to take notes like you, but since I’m quite chaotic I’ve found that it is a lot easier for me to just write a small paragraph (citations and all) for all the info that I find, and then at the end copy the document with 30+ pages of writing for my 10 page essay and in the second document I cut and rewrite and boil down the whole thing to a clear and condensed essay.
I'm less organised than that... I write out the reference and paraphrase the bits I want to remember and add it to the multilevel bullet point plan of the essay (that I outline as early in the process as possible). My papers rarely have direct quotes from the reading but I never write more than 10% over the target length of an essay before editing.
This help me a lot in my article critique. Thank you!
Holy crap you look like Ramsay Bolton (Iwan Rheon) from Game of Thrones! Great video, thanks for sdharing.
Haha, oh dear, I think this is gonna become a thing...
I actually scrolled through the comments to see who else thought he looked like Ramsay. 😄
Omg I agree. Ramsay is my favorite by the way.
Also little bit like Jackson Stewart (Earles) who was Hannah Montana's brother..
@@anyaoliver2576 same hahaha
The background music reminds me of the game. Thanks for the advices and bringing back the old memories for the game. ♥️
I love this! Very clever, simple and effective! Definitely going to be using this! Thank you so much! 😁
Glad you found it useful Caroline! Best of luck with your studies!
Super helpful - thanks Tom!
This seems like a great approach. I'm excited to try it.
for those who are too lazy to remember how to compile a correct citation, you can export styled citation from mendeley directly.
Or with the Google Scholar extension
and citation machine!
So helpful with my undergrad stuff ! cheers mate
this is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks Mate
I do not know you at all but it helped me! thanks a lot, man! Great way to take notes while reading and writing.
Mendeley has the options of different colors, so I use that for diferentiating the reason I highlighted it - green "to cite", blue "very relevant", pink "key take-away". Plus, when I copy the sentences to Word, where I write my papers, I color it the same color as it is highlighted, so going back is very easy.
Great info, Tom Keep up the good work.
Thanks a lot for this video Tom, very helpful :)
Just started using Evernote and this video was really helpfull
Never thought to use evernote. Thanks for this vid, my good man.
+The Nizzah One No worries! I find it has the best balance of having some useful features without being so whizzy as to get in the way. One of the only things that's persuaded me to swap it for the apps that already came on my phone. Also, the free version is more than enough (unless you want to upload loads of photos or something).
Wow, super simple and well explained, thank you
Thank you for the tips. I am doing my research paper by the way.
Awesome work, is really hard to find videos like these, thanks
Cheers, hope you found it helpful Nelson!
Very nice and i"ll try your method. Thanks.
Thank yo so much. I would like you to do more videos on philosophers -Marx, Hegel, post modernists,post colonial. I have watched almost all of your videos . They are simple, clear and crisp.
G thanks I'm having trouble on how to tackle this confusing article and your video helped a lot
Really pleased to hear that, hope you've cracked the article now!
This is really helpful, thank you!
This is so helpful!
I am starting my PhD this September so wanted to use the next few months to create an organisation plan - better to start organised than to get organised later on and then have to review everything you went over before.
Thanks for sharing your tips - really appreciated - I've subscribed :)
+Evie Bamigbade Glad it was useful Evie and best of luck with starting out, I'm sure you'll find it a really fun challenge!
Let me know if there's anything else you'd be interested to hear about before you start, suggestions and questions are always welcome!
Thank you Tom :). I will defo be sure to send some questions and video suggestions your way :).
Maybe a video where you mention 5 things you wish you knew/did before starting your PhD?
Awesome, that's a great shout. Haha, do I have to limit it to 5!!
For research papers I usually do the standard thing of reasing abstract, then method titles, thenconclusions, then results & discussion, in any order, then if necessary some methods sections. If I feel I don't have the paper down by that I might do a re-read of some sections. I've had phases of highlighting, but I find these are not consistent with each other lol
Really appreciate this! Thank you
Oh wow! I didn't knew reading was that easy!
This is very helpful, thank you!
As a doctor, I’m quite intrigued to see if this might help me a bit. Admittedly I don’t often have to write stuff after reading papers but occasionally this might be useful for a Journal club or somesuch.
great video , I really enjoy it!!
This is incredibly helpful! I am an undergrad in the very beginnings of my research and haven't been able to figure out how to keep track of all of this stuff as I prepare to apply for grad school. Thank you for the tips!
Thank you for sharing this. You saved me a lot of time.
thank you...for all your great tips...much appreciated
+Beth dexter Glad to have been helpful!!
I found this very useful!. Thanks Tom!
+james21794 Glad to hear it James, no worries! Let me know if there's anything else you'd like me to do a video on!
I enjoyed your video and how you take notes. Love that you are noting content for citations in your notes. My only suggestion is to note the name of the author cited in the original content into your Evernote citation because if you chose to use that sentence, your citation in APA should include that author (citing a secondary source) and you might forget otherwise.
I will admit I haven’t watched this back for a while so hopefully am remembering what’s in the video right but...
I’d generally avoid citing sources which are citing sources and, instead, dig out the original source that is being cited. That’s why, usually, I jot down just the source they’re referring to and then go away and appraise that on its own merit. It can look a little lazy to have not have done so (although sometimes it’s unavoidable). But, yes, if noting down a citation within a source, important to have the ‘cited in’ in your notes.
Good work mate, thanks 👍🏻
thanks for sharing these tips
Thank you very much Sir, it's really helpful and your method is highly practical too. Big like and subscribe
Do you have an extended version of this video? Or further tips & tricks for note-taking and 'getting your school-shit together' :) love the videos btw, you're a very likeable person!
Super useful technique!
This is great stuff, thank you very much! ^_^
great video !!loving the accent as always!
Thanks? I dunno, I guess it's just how I talk, haha!
Great video!
I use a color-coded system for highlighting.
Yellow: general information
Blue: key concepts/ideas
Green: definitions
Red: super important stuff (conclusions, unique findings, etc.)
Purple: info that’s directly useful to the project I’m working on and that I want to quote fully.
Obviously you can use different colors for different things. But it helps, when going back to an article, to be able to quickly identify what type of information you need.
really inspiring, thanks!
Thanks, Tom! This is similar to my method although I just do it in Word and Evernote would be better. May I ask what software you used to make this video? The 2 screens side-by-side is quite helpful and I would like to use the method in my work.
I found this useful for my study. thank you.
Glad to hear it Myzeedah! Best of luck wth your studies!
Thanks for the tips! Keep up the good work!
No worries, hope they were useful in some small way!
Absolutely. Going for my Education Specialist degree now (after my masters) so I continue to refine my study skills! :)
Thanks alot for this video. Do make more :)
Thank you thank you thank you thank you THANK YOU!!
Thank you very much!!
This video is such useful one.
Glad to have stumbled upon this video! Would like to ask, are you using the free or the premium version of Evernote?
Very interesting videos ! I was wondering, do you only note down quotes or do you paraphrase or start memoing/adressing how you would use the quotes in your writing ?
Usually, I tend to just note to begin with however, often, I will return to papers/books which I think are of particular interest and read them with the very direct objective of considering how I will make use of them for a particular piece of writing.
i find your method useful..thanks for sharing your technique..
Glad to hear it Sandip, no worries at all.
Thank you for sharing this video! Do you also have any videos on help to write a literature review? Thanks!
Thank a lot Tom, I am doing my master thesis by using onenote and google keep. I organized articles according to my thesis topics .I gather about 45 article, now thinking to read and take notes each of them 🙈 seems too much time and effort !😔🤔That's a long way, wish me luck !
Good luck with it all!
Bitirdin mi bari
@@emrevone Evet bitti sayılır ama zor bir süreç
thank you, i needed this
Glad to have helped Eilis!
Thanks for this! :)
Great tips for organization to synthesize the information later. The dissertation process is a world apart from traditional study patterns. Much of the information that is needed for citation can get lost in the process without good organization.
Even with my trusty system, I still lose notes or struggle to re-find a thought I jotted down every so often!
@@Tom_Nicholas Just wanted to say thank you for your introduction to OneNote/EverNote as well. I had not used these before and after your video I googled some info on them and started my own OneNote system. It wasn't difficult to learn and now I can have all my information in one place. I spent the entire morning moving my Lit review notes and references into OneNote. Thanks again.
What would you recommend for understanding the highly technical words that the articles use???
Hello and thank you, a fabulous and informative video. Out of interest, what citation/reference software do you use, thanks.
Thank you for the information
so helpful, thanks for sharing
No worries, hope you found it helpful!
Hey Tom..What areas Should be more focus on body after introduction .. while writing review paper.