What is my end-goal in taking notes on a paper?

When you are finished reading a paper, you should end up with the following three things:

1. A Summary of the Main Findings of the Paper

What do they actually show? This summary is largely in your own words and should be no longer than a half page.

Here’s an example summary for: Scott, C., Klein, D. M., & Bryant, J. (1990). Consumer response to humor in advertising: A series of field studies using behavioral observation. Journal of Consumer Research, 16(4), 498-501.

Purpose: Test the behavioral impact of humorous versus non-humorous promotional efforts.

H1: Humorous promotions will increase attendance only for social events (congruent), and not business events (incongruent).

H2: Subjects exposed to humorous promotions for social events should show greater levels of anticipation of enjoyment than those exposed to non-humorous promotions.

Methods: 2 (flyer: humorous, non-humorous, control) X 2 (event: social, business). DVs were attendance of the event and non-verbal expressions of enjoyment while at the event.

Results: For social events, attendance was greater among people who had received promotional material containing humorous promotions than among people receiving other types of promotions. These people also seemed to enjoy the social events more. Differences in frequency of attendance were not significant across promotion types at any of the business events.

2. Highlights and annotations that help you speed read next time

Highlights of things like:

3. An idea of what papers to read next

When I read papers, they often cite other papers related to my research topic. So, reading one paper often gives me ideas of 4-5 papers to read next.

Step 1: Find a reference manager

If you’re writing a research paper, you will need a reference manager to keep track of all your citations. There are many options on the market, but you need to find one with the following characteristics:

  1. It has a word plug-in such that you can use it to create your final bibliography
  2. It has a feature where you can highlight text from the document and save it somewhere so you can easily return
  3. It has a feature such that you can take your own notes on the document (very important) and easily find and return to them later. These notes should be about the whole document, not weird comments on particular sections.

This will allow you to store everything for the end-goal alongside the paper, and make referencing papers in your thesis much easier.