How I Take Notes When Doing Research

Following a suggestion by Clive Thompson.

Clive Thompson recently wrote How I Take Notes When I’m Doing Research, in which he lays out his thinking about research, and — to a limited extent — the tools and techniques he employs. He ends the piece he asks ‘Let me know if you do something like this, what it looks like, and how it works for you!’, so here I go.

Although Thompson talks with other reporters about work,

one thing we almost never talk about, I realize, is how to take notes when you’re doing research.

Really? Why don’t they talk about that? Is it a secret? Are people’s approaches so different to be incommensurable? Well, a lot of people in the Tools for Thinking community talk about it, although not necessarily with the same intense focus on research for writing.

He then lays the context: he’s a researcher poring over a lot of text.

When I say “doing research” I mean specifically when I’m doing textual research — like, reading books or scholarly articles or news-site posts.

[…]

As it happens, my journalism often requires I read a mountain of material. For any given Wired column, for example, I might read dozens of white papers, reports, and news articles. I’ll also do ten or twelve interviews and transcribe them. When I’m researching a longer feature for a magazine? This number quickly grows to scores of documents, and several dozen…