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

My heart sunk when he said no way around reading, lol.

Dude, as one PhD scientist to another: YOU ARE A NATURAL TEACHER AND NEED TO BE IN THE CLASSROOM! I’d take your course “Scholarship for the Natural Sciences Scientist”. Cheers.

Funny enough, creating a 20 min presentation of each of my dissertation chapters is how I outline. It also means I have something to present anytime a conference comes up.

Im not even doing a PhD but I love this so much as a lifelong learner.❤

Always a pleasure learning from you Andy! As always, this one made me regret why I didn't know about you in the early years of my PhD...i spent 2 years just reading and building a good foundation before I could even begin my process. Anyway, after 7 years of working like crazy, several episodes of paranoia and almost quitting, I got my doctorate in Linguistics last Thursday 😁 February 23rd!! You were a big part of my support system in the past 2 years. Your videos, approach, attitude everything gave me so much hope and vision for my life after PhD. Thank you for doing this!

# Key Takeaway Points 0:00 You don’t have to read every single paper in your field → you need to be able to go through the literature and discern what is good and what isn’t just taking notes never worked for me 0:52 Filtering Stage Google Scholar or Elicit to find papers Google Slides or PowerPoint → great way to have all of your lit reviews in one place in a visual way Things I put in each paper's slide: - paper title - paper link - as long as we can find it again, that’s all it matters - take-home message - skim abstract and conclusion - summarize → during this stage, you might even don't do it yourself → ask ChatGPT to summarize the abstract in three bullet points at this point, I’m not interested in the details - interesting figures → a visual representation of what is in that paper - interesting visual cues that could be interesting or useful in the future - other notes - simple tags to remember why a certain paper was useful [delete the ones that do not apply to this paper] - lit review - discovery → for example, smth I want to tell people in my group about - must read - method → smth I want to do, I want to apply this or try it - idea → It’s interesting to me right now and I want to ruminate on it for a little bit if I did anything more, I’d spend hours reading papers that might not even be good or that I might not even need 12:35 Reading the Paper in Detail There is no trick to this. There is no shortcut Maybe, if it’s not 100% important to you, you could read just the abstract, the conclusion, and whatever else interests you, but you have to do it yourself. Underline and take notes on margins Print it and take notes on it, trust me. You don’t have to print it, but I noticed that if I read it on the computer I am not really reading it as I should → I would keep just the pages where I’ve written smth: those are the pages that actually interest me

Andy, this is much appreciated and makes life easier. Not even a PhD student but I love this approach

I always say the inventor of YouTube is a genius, and videos like this one is the reason why. Just brilliant! Thank you Andy🙌🏾

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I am a 45 yo old masters/phd bound student and I have tried all the digital stuff to really engage with the work. Your video just gave me permission to print. I’ve always done my best work with by engaging in the margins and using post it notes. Then I move it into my Zotero or digital notes app. I did undergrad in the late 90s so all we really had was note cards and post its. I’m going to stop fighting what has always worked best for me and lean in to how I best make those connections. 😊

I know you said it doesn't work for you, but notes on Zotero have gotten SUBSTANTIALLY better. You can mark and highlight directly on the document, add individual notes (I use it for book chapters), make general notes, etc. and tag it the whole way. All of this can then be searched centrally or within a specific collection or subcollection. Absolutely fantastic for me.

Wow, Andy....Thank you for doing soooo much work and helping us PhD students have a less stressful journey...Big ups...you are boss...

Thanks for sharing your research-related videos with us. As a new PhD student, I enjoyed watching them and they have helped a lot.

i use Zotero, which is open-source and very featureful: grab paper by doi, tags, folders, markdown (with katex) notes, word/open office integration, csl styles, multiple accounts (with separate databases), and it has a good linux compatibility.

Being a visual learner myself, I have been struggling with wordy Excel. This method will definitely help me. Thank you Andy. Love how crisp and simple, yet so helpful your videos are!

HONESTLY - I can not thank you enough forthis video and some of your previous ones! I have felt exhausted and overwhelmed and feeling quite inadequate in this academic and research domain. Not one of my lecturers have broken down these tips, techniques, methods or approach - in the way you have successfully done! You are awesome! Much gratitude and appreciation!

I cannot express my gratitude enough for this. I’ve gone my entire undergrad and Masters never really having learned an efficient way to research literature. You’ve just earned a subscriber, thank you buddy.

Thank you Andy, this looks quite useful in terms of retrieval . I have done few trials of note taking but this one looks more appealing to me.

I just want to say thank you for all your work on these videos. I am starting my PhD this summer and because I have been out of school for a while, I am taking this time to lay all the foundational knowledge and tools into my brain. Your videos have been immensely helpful!

Here you'll find the best mentors who are much more willing to share and inspire!!! Can't appreciate this enough, Andy (with joyful tears. I'm not a PHD student but someone who wants to gain better researching skills

This was so, so helpful! Thank you so much! You're an excellent teacher, and your ideas are so good! I agree, I'd much rather have physical copies of things, and I'm very visual, so the slides work much better for me than long blocks of text-only notes. Thank you!