Lit review template OR not?
Hi I am getting confused as to how to tackle a whole book or research paper and the production of notes. I'm doing a literature review as part of a phd, so academic level critique needed. The referencing I can easily cite at the end of the note so that isn't a concern. Does one research paper produce many notes, how does one title these notes please? Is it the concept or the book etc. thank you
(sorry I am trying to move this to the other section but cannot see how to do this, I realise I've posted in the wrong place)
Zoe
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Hi and welcome to the forum!!
The idea of writing a note in your Zettelkasten, often called a "zettel", is to have one coherent thought on each. Sometimes people call these "atomic thoughts". There has been some discussion of what actually constitutes an atomic thought, which is why I prefer the term coherent.
Anyway, not to get sidetracked and to actually answer your question, if you are reading an article or a book, you can often write many zettels. It partly depends on the length of the original and partly on the "idea density" of the original. I read about a 100 page book recently, in which I was quite interested, but I found there were only about 5 main ideas and so only wrote 5 zettels. If I was reading a technical article of say 5 pages I might generate 20 zettels.
When reading a book, many people like to take temporary notes (or highlight main concepts, if they are reading from a PDF). These aren't actually part of your Zettelkasten. But then later, you can process these temporary notes, i.e., organize them in your mind, decide how you want to break them down, or not, and how you want to express them in your own words. Then you can actually write the zettels.
I hope this gets you started. Certainly also look at the "Getting Started" section on this web site, as there is some good information there on how to create zettels. And there will be many others providing good advice in response to your question, as well.
thank you very much. I have just got Ahren's book so will have a good read. I've just read a chapter in a particular academic book it was very dense in terms of prompting ideas so therefore I created quite a few (Actually a lot) of notes that I'll use to group themes. Hopefully I'll get this right. I've certainly been guilty of being side tracked with process and tools which is frustrating. I like to do things simply to aid the writing. I like the creativity so far of linking thoughts. I do have some technical worries at the moment with obsidian but I'll get there albeit slowly. thank you again.
For a literature review, you might find Adler & Van Doren more immediate and interesting (compared to Ahrens), particularly chapter 20 on syntopical reading. This may help you to better focus your annotating and note making practices. Consider it a big conversation, but all the participants are writing instead of speaking.
Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book: The Classical Guide to Intelligent Reading. Revised and Updated edition. 1940. Reprint, Touchstone, 2011.
While the more significant notes can be useful in the long run and can be used as the backbone of your work, I often personally find that my shorter annotations and highlights/tags in a literature review are incredibly helpful for comparison and contrast later, so don't discount the value of these.
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You need to ask yourself first what you want to create. Do you want to have a big note that you consult if you want to retrieve a certain piece of information or knowledge? Do you want to have a collection of notes that you can access as a list? Do you want to have an information map? An information map that follows the article structure, the article's content structure?
These questions are not so much questions that the Zettelkasten Method by itself answers (or any method worth its salt) but that only can be answered by the strategy and tactics you use to position yourself for the task at hand.
This is an example how I process a certain book: KLICK
You need to bring in your personal education into your Zettelkasten. The Zettelkasten Method by itself provides you with maneuvers to build a network of thoughts and ideas, thinking canvases and information maps (~structure notes) and those kinds of things.
But to just give you the cookie cutter answer: Each idea should get its individual note. This is called the principle of atomicity. The rationale behind this is that this enables you to build a network of thoughts/ideas which allows you to develop relationships between those ideas/thoughts which is the substance for more complex thinking (e.g. provide a central idea with supporting ideas).
But even this more general answer leaves the end result open. A research paper could elaborate just on one idea, which should result in one note. But it could provide the backbone for the structure of a bigger and complex idea. Then you'd write one structure note and refer to each ideas.
I am a Zettler