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by ryqiem 2274 days ago
Just wrote a short summary of my method to a friend. Might not be terribly readable for people who haven't used Roam, so take it for what it's worth. Hope it's for some use :-)

What I do is an interaction between the following:

Article <-> Tags <-> Hypotheses <-> Synthesis <-> Prediction <-> Research

So I might read an article, then tag the article/figures with the relevant tags. If it's for a specific project, I keep a list of tags on a separate page. This ensure that I use the tags consistently, so that I can find all the relevant articles later.

I purposefully keep the tags general, like "psychiatric conditions" rather than "depression, mania, schizophrenia" etc. When I reach the hypotheses page, this means that I can form relatively general hypotheses, and then nest them into gradually more specific hypothesis that are specifically supported by the articles.

Then, I use those hypotheses to form new predictions. These predictions turn into new research questions, which I either explore via the literature or doing my own experiments.

An example of this might be: "Wood 2018" <-> #Procedural Memory #Habits <-> Habits are part of procedural memory [[H]] <-> Habits are part of procedural memory [[H]] & Procedural memory is stored in the basal ganglia [[H]] <-> Damage to the basal ganglia disrupts habits [[H]] <-> Seger 2011

This affords me a lot of flexibility in total processing time; I don't spend a lot of time forming hypotheses that aren't interesting/necessary for me, I can quickly tag a lot of sources, and I can quickly collate those sources on a specific topic when necessary.

You might say that the first half of the workflow is "induction", the second half "deduction and confirmation".

I would love it if you had any questions or comments, but just writing this up has been useful for me as well.

1 comments

Do you by any chance also have some experience with taking general (think college) notes in this way? I'm a STEM student and having a hard time with organising knowledge to be both useful on exams (i.e. containing hard facts, proofs) and _after_ them (i.e. containing intuition, connections). I'd be happy to chat about this as well.

You can shoot me an email on "mr [dot] sh4rpeye" at gmail.