Transcription
Foreign, welcome back to my channel. On here, I talk about Reading, Writing, note-taking, Knowledge Management, research, and Academia. And today's topic kind of encapsulates all of those things. Today, I want to talk about my entire research to writing workflow, starting from just a topic concept, to researching that concept, to taking notes on it, and then finally to building an outline that helps me write about that original topic.
This workflow specifically uses three different tools. It uses Google Scholar to find materials, it uses Zotero to manage those materials, and then finally Obsidian to manage the knowledge that emerges from those materials. So, if you are a person that needs to do research in order to better understand a topic and then maybe even create about that topic, then this video is for you. I'm going to show you absolutely every step along that road. Basically, I want to help you make research as painless as possible, which means making it as reliable as possible, as fast as possible, and as long-lasting as possible, because any research you're doing today, you might need 10 or 20 or 30 years down the road.
So, let's say that you have a topic that you want to research or write about. Maybe this was assigned by one of your professors, maybe it's just an exciting thought that you had and you want to start delving deeper. The first thing you're going to do is think of some words that are directly related to this topic. So, tool number one is Google Scholar. You're gonna open up Google Scholar and type in your topic. Personally, I'm writing my dissertation right now and I'm working on a sort of context or literature review section, and the specific topic that I want to know more about is the field of new materialism. So, new materialism is my topic. I'm going to go into Google Scholar and search for new materialism.
Now, new materialism is a big topic. A lot of people have written about new materialism, so I want to narrow this down a bit using Boolean terms. I'm going to include a link below to a website I found that has a really easy and clear explanation of Boolean terms and how you can use them. But specifically, I'm going to use the term "and" in order to narrow my search, because I specifically want to find articles that are about new materialism and and climate change, or as I'm articulating it, the anthropocene. So, that search looks like: "new materialism AND ANTHROPOCENE" (all in caps). And when I click search, I'm going to see a bunch of different articles pop up, and I can look at the titles of those articles, the person that wrote them, and then a little extract from them to see which ones might be relevant. In my case, that first one, "The Politics of Nature: New Materialist Responses to the Anthropocene," sounds absolutely perfect. That's exactly what I'm looking for.
So, I'm going to click into that source. And when I click into here, I'm not actually going to be able to read the paper, but that's okay, because I don't want to yet. First, I just want to look at the abstract. The abstract is a really reduced synopsis of the entire paper and its findings, its methodology, whatever important information the author thinks you need to know in order to decide if this paper is for you. So, first, I'm going to read the abstract. In this case, it does look like it's really relevant, because the author is mentioning Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett, and those are some theorists that are already in my dissertation. So, this is definitely a paper I'm going to want to read. If the abstract doesn't look relevant, I would just click right off of that paper and go find a different one whose abstract does look relevant, because there are so many papers out there about every single topic, and you don't want to waste your time downloading and reading an entire article only to find that it's just not relevant to you.
In this case, I do want to read the full article, but like I said, um, this is behind a paywall. There's restrictions as to who can access this article, so I can't actually just go download the PDF. Instead, and this is a sneaky tool in there, I'm going to go to my university's library. And you may not have this option, so you might have to pay for the article, or there is tons of academic articles that are just open resources for anybody to read. In my case, I do have access to a university library, so I'm going to go into my library website and search for this article. Now, sometimes I find that if I just search for the article's name or the author's name, too many results come back. So, what I'm going to do is actually type in the name of the journal that the article is in and go to the journal page itself on the website for the journal. They usually have an option to search within just that journal. So, I'm going to just put the first part of this title, "The Politics of Nature," into the search bar and search for just this journal and see if it comes up. Usually, when I do this, it comes up right away, but because these terms are so generic, I had to scroll down a bit to find it. But there it is. So, I'm going to click on that and then move into the Zotero phase of research.
Zotero is an app on your computer that you're going to have to download. It's totally free. There's lots of tutorials about how to organize your Zotero online. But once you've got Zotero in there and set up, there's a couple ways that you can pull this specific article into Zotero. Firstly, you could just download the PDF, save it to your file explorer, and then go to the file and drag and drop it into Zotero. Or, I've got the Chrome extension for Zotero, so I can go to the upper right-hand corner of my computer screen and I can click to save to Zotero, and I can organize where the file is going in Zotero right from my browser. So, I don't need to like specifically download this at all. I can just ask Zotero to do everything for me. And once I click done, that file and all of its metadata is now in Zotero.
So, let's hop over there. When I open Zotero, if I have just saved something, it's going to open to the actual folder where that thing is now living, and it's going to highlight that thing. If I click on this source in Zotero, on the right-hand side, it's going to open up all the metadata. So, you can see that it took all of this information off the website or off the PDF, and now I have all of the information about when this was published, where it was published, what the URL is, etc., etc. Even the abstract is in here. And if I press the little down arrow on this source, you're going to see the PDF is also auto-loaded. So, double-click on that, and it's going to open up the PDF in a new tab. In here, you can read the PDF and you can annotate it. So, this is actually when I'm going to read the article. And as I read it, I'm highlighting different sentences that I might want to save to my own system and remember for later. After this phase, I'm going to be exporting all of my highlights and notes into Obsidian, where I'm going to store and manage them.
So, this first read of the paper, I'm actually reading quite quickly and just highlighting things that look interesting. I know that every highlight I'm actually going to return to later when I bring this into Obsidian, so I don't need to like agonize over every single detail. Everything that looks interesting, I'm gonna read again later. So, this way, I can pretty much just read this article once, quite quickly, and that's enough. Every time I highlight something that requires extra context to understand, or that I have an immediate thought about, I'm going to leave a note on it in the left-hand side, where Zotero is storing all of my highlights. And when I bring this into Obsidian, all of the highlights and their associated comments from me are going to appear in my Obsidian.
So, once I've read the whole article, I've highlighted interesting things, things that I think I might want to remember, and I've thought expansively about that because I'm going to be storing this forever. I don't want to come back to this article later. I want to have stored everything that might be relevant, including anything I find in the notes section or anything in the bibliography that I also might want to refer to. I'm going to highlight that stuff too, so that I've got it and I've got it saved. Once I've done that, I'm going to go over to the main library area of Zotero and return to that PDF document. If you right-click on the PDF, you're going to have the option to make a file out of the annotations. So, click that, and all of your annotations are going to appear on the right-hand side.
Now, there are two ways to bring these into Obsidian that are easy and that I know of. Ryan Jenks has a lot more in-depth ways of linking Zotero and Obsidian. Personally, I find them really convoluted and intimidating, so this is what I do instead. Either you can export a markdown file from the annotations. This incorporates all of the metadata, so all the links to the PDF, etc. And I find all of that clutter really annoying, so I don't do that. I don't export this to a markdown file that then lives in my Obsidian folder. Instead, I just go over to the annotations on the right-hand side, I click Control A to highlight all of them, and then I Control C to copy all of them. And then I just go into Obsidian, start a new note, and paste all of my highlights in there. As per usual, I name each source note after the author's name, the year it was published, and then the title or a reduced title of the work. And then the first thing I put in the note is the MLA citation for the work. And remember, you have all of the metadata of this article in Zotero already pulled out for you, so you can just use that to fill in your bibliographic information in Obsidian or whatever note-taking knowledge management software you use.
And now I have my source note. I have everything I could possibly want from this article in my knowledge management software already. So, I'm done with Zotero now, unless I need to refer to something later to clarify or whatever. I always have that PDF there. I already have it with the highlights stored, so it's there if I need it. But hopefully, I don't need it. Hopefully, that was the one time I read that paper, and now I'm good to draw quotes from that and develop my own ideas in relation to it. And how do I do that? Well, I have some previous videos on how I take notes once I've got source notes in my Obsidian, and I can link those below. But basically, every quote in this source note, I'm going to be rereading and seeing if I can either add it to an existing note in my system or create a new note about this idea. And this is the way that I'm going from somebody else's ideas about a topic to developing my own ideas that I might have merged from their ideas, while still acknowledging the people I got the original ideas from.
So, once I've reread these quotes and created my own thought that has stemmed from them, or summarized them in my own words in ways that might make sense for my own thinking, then I jump into an Obsidian canvas where I now outline all of my papers. And you can actually pull notes that you've made and drop them directly into canvas. And in this way, every time I'm making notes and writing in my own words, I'm also contributing towards the writing of my future papers. And this entire process from topic to outline is cyclical. So, I am never just downloading all of my PDFs and then just reading all of my PDFs and then just making notes on all my PDFs and then just writing a paper. I'm always doing these things like in a cycle with and alongside each other. So, I may not have a paper idea yet, but I have a bunch of notes written in my own words, and then a paper idea is going to emerge from that. Or I might be writing a paper and not have a note in there based on a topic I want to write about, so I'm going to go back to Google Scholar and see if I can find something that will help me write about that thing.
And I find that this Google Scholar, Zotero, Obsidian workflow keeps everything really quick for me. It means that I don't have to go back to the article over and over. It means that I don't have to worry about storing my PDFs. I don't have to worry about storing my notes. Everything is kind of managed and taken care of within Zotero and Obsidian, as long as I'm doing my due diligence to actually read the paper and actually create notes about it. So, let me know if this was helpful. Let me know if you do something different. And let me know if you want to see a more in-depth process for any specific part of that topic through to outlining process. Good luck with your research, everybody, and I'll see you in another video soon. Bye.
I just wanted to come on here and say one last final thing, which is that if I had a good way to connect Zotero and Obsidian more fully, a way that was like easy for me to understand and didn't come along with all of this like external linking, or I understood the external linking and it was like a convenient way to like access the article again, but also worked within my title cast and where I'm like moving all of these pieces around, then I would absolutely do that. So, if you have like a good, easy method to link Zotero and Obsidian, I would absolutely love to hear it, because I am taking your ideas all the time. I mean, I'm using canvas now because of one of your comments, and I'm also using that new copy-paste plugin tool because of one of your comments in my last video. So, yes, please tell me your Zotero ideas.
And the other thing I want to say is that obviously Zotero is going to come back into this process again during the writing process, because I use Microsoft Word, and my Zotero is hooked up to that as well. So, if you're wondering what else Zotero does, it also can actually create your citations as you are writing and then auto-create your bibliography from those citations. So, hopefully, when I am done some of this outlining phase of my dissertation, I will also create a video on that.