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 Propositions of the paper

As a result of their review of the literature and their conceptualizations, the authors will likely come up with a new theory. Your notes should be a summary of this theory.

Here’s an example summary for: [fill in]

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

Highlights of definitions or specifics that you really like. However, in this paper, you should be taking notes on the developed theory, not just highlighting it.

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: Try to get a sense of the structure of the theory

These types of papers will usually have some sort of explicit structure that they follow. This structure is usually laid out in a figure or a table early in the paper. If it’s not, look at the headings for all the sections. This will give you an idea of the structure of the paper

Example 1

This figure from Holbrook & Hirschman (1982) tells you that the two main topics of the review will be “Environmental Inputs” and “Consumer Inputs” and that each has a variety of sub-ideas.

So, in setting up the structure of your notes, you would write the following:

ENVIRONMENTAL INPUTS

• products
• stimulus properties
• communication content

CONSUMER INPUTS

• resources
• task definition
• etc

Example 2