Organizing Research Notes in Evernote

[JackBDMN 0]

Currently navigating the complexities of managing extensive research notes within Evernote and could use some guidance from fellow users. Curious about how do you use an whatsapp 10 guys tackle organizing and streamlining research materials, especially for academic or professional work. How do you structure your notes to make things as efficient and easy to find as possible?

[PinkElephant 8,305]

Some key words - you find more in the help database:

Search (advanced search language, boolean search, saved searches, filters)

Tagging (nested tags, structured tag tree)

Links (TOC Table of Content note, backlinks)

[VincentC 279]

Also look for YouTube videos or online articles by Vlad Campos, Stacey Harmon, John Tromans (Taming the Trunk) and others.  Just make sure that the materials you're looking at are for Version 10 and not Legacy.

 

Vinnie

[mackid1993 1,004]

I don't really use any method. I have a structure that works for me. Just a simple Inbox and Archive. Then notebooks for a common topic organized into stacks for more broad concepts and areas.

Tiago Forte has some videos on more systemic approaches that may be suitable.

[gazumped 11,780]

I'm now using the latest features to help when researching new areas - the collapsing paragraphs feature allows me to set up headings to categorise my reading,  and I can copy/ paste items like quotes,  URLs, images and text into a note under appropriate headings.  Seems like up to 200MB of content can be collapsed back to a dozen headings for a top level view,  and each one of those headings can expand to more headings,  and each one of those headings...  Basically I'm taking my morass of basic input and sorting it into separate categories;  then I can look at each category in more detail and summarise the content to its main points,  condensing a bucket-load of raw data into a few pages of useful information.

As I started doing that,  it was reported that large notes with many headers seemed to be slowing the system down - and I still don't like having all my data in one note where a mistake could delete everything - so I switched to use the new /New Linked Note option which again lets me type categories and save the raw data to a new linked note...  which can itself link to other notes if there are more threads to follow.

It does very much depend though what details your research entails,  and how you prefer to work!  

 

[Feitz 212]

9 hours ago, JackBDMN said:

How do you structure your notes to make things as efficient and easy to find as possible?

Are you on a Mac? Since tagging is very basic in V10 I would suggest to have a look at LEAP.APP. 

Put everything into PDFs that sit in a structured folder with only two or three levels (not too deep). Then you can tag your files however you like and later can drill down and search everything in a snap. Stored searches, smart folders, full text, all available instantly.

I did exactly this for a legal case that had some 5000 documents, started off with Legacy (that had better tagging than V10) but was utterly lost so exported everything to PDF files and the more there are the more this solution shines for me. Tag cloud, recent tags, tag filters, combined with other criteria.

I'm not writing this to bash Evernote (there are other posts where this is appropriate) but the solution for me in a similar situation was so far superior to Evernote (Legacy and even more so V10) that I had to chime in...

[PinkElephant 8,305]

Tagging … v10 … basic 

If anything was „basic“, it was legacy tagging. Want an example ? You could nest the tags in the desktop client. Then you went to mobile: No nesting available - all effort invested into a good nesting structure wasted. Completely inconsistent, as many features when you used the legacy clients on several platforms.

[Feitz 212]

55 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

If anything was „basic“, it was legacy tagging

Obviously you don't have any comparison to something more sophisticated... Evernote taging .IS. basic, and V10 is even more so since i can't even select and tag more than 100 notes which is ridiculous...

[gazumped 11,780]

Ah well - if we're talking serious research,  you may want to look at https://docear.org/

[Jean-Christophe 25]

Tagging is still very basic in Evernote V10, as it was in legacy V7.

You can add a tag, or multiple tags to a note, correct.
On mobile, tagging is predictive, you just tap the first letters of an existing tag and a list appears.
On desktop, no way. I asked the support, they said "yes good idea to do the same predictive tagging on desktop", but this never came.

No inline tagging as in modern tools, I mean writing #ThisIsATag to add an inline tag does not exist.

No possibility to create a note from a tag, with ALT+click on tag for instance.

No search in context menu, to find all relevant tagged notes.

Etc...

Comparing V7 to V10 is a thing, comparing modern tools with V10 is a way to measure the distance betwwen V10 and other tools.
The is still a lot to do in V10 to have a state of the art notes tool.
 

[Mike P 2,774]

1 hour ago, Jean-Christophe said:

No possibility to create a note from a tag, with ALT+click on tag for instance.

Clcik the tag to filter by it and then create a new note.

 

[Mike P 2,774]

1 hour ago, Jean-Christophe said:

No search in context menu, to find all relevant tagged notes.

Could you explain what you mean? Which context menu, where? Lots of ways of finding "all relevant tagged notes" so I am interested to know what you want.

[Jean-Christophe 25]

40 minutes ago, Mike P said:

Clcik the tag to filter by it and then create a new note.

 

This is a different usecase.
Let's say you have a note with an inline tag, like #MyTopic.
You realize that it could be a good idea to add content to this topic outside of the actual note.
Then you ALT+Click on the tag and this creates a new note named "MyTopic".

Of course you can do this differently, but this gives me much more flexibility.

[Jean-Christophe 25]

44 minutes ago, Mike P said:

Could you explain what you mean? Which context menu, where? Lots of ways of finding "all relevant tagged notes" so I am interested to know what you want.

This is what I use now, and what I see when I right click a tag.

[Mike P 2,774]

I'm not sure that it is entirely appropriate to compare a system with inline tags with Evernote. I can filter by tag from a tag at the bottom of a note - it's just at the bottom of the note as that is the EN system.

There are also other ways of creating a new note from a tag but they are certainly not as quick and easy as the way I've already described or your way in the alternative app.

I can see pros and cons of EN style tags vs inline tags. I certainly don't think that it is cut and dry that one method is much better than the other. Fortunately there are different apps out there and we can all decide what is best for our workflows.

[Jean-Christophe 25]

It is not better as EN, it is different, and to me much more efficient.
Looking at what EN does and trying to find solutions on how to use EN is fine but limiting, looking to what other software do is important too. Flexibility, options, efficiency, this is what I ask to my note app.