Emergent scholarship

Course Lessons

Literature notes

11 min read

Lesson overview

Objective: Write literature notes as part of your reading practice

Summary: Literature notes capture your thinking as you engage with sources – whether articles, books, presentations, or other media. Rather than simply highlighting passages or collecting references, literature notes document your understanding, questions, critical observations, and connections to other ideas. This lesson explores how to create literature notes that remain connected to their sources while forming the foundation for your own thinking and writing.

Key habits:

  • Take literature notes while engaging with sources rather than treating reading as passive consumption
  • Capture your thoughts and questions about the material, not just excerpts from it
  • Keep literature notes connected to their original sources using a reference manager
  • Review and process literature notes regularly, using them as raw material for permanent notes

Introduction

You need to take some form of literature note that captures your understanding of the text, so you have something in front of your eyes while you are making the [permanent] note. But don’t turn it into a project in itself. Literature notes are short and meant to help with writing. - Sönke Ahrens (2017)

Capturing your thinking when working through a text can be surprisingly difficult. Most academics regularly need to take notes while reading articles, watching conference presentations, listening to podcasts, or reviewing draft manuscripts. These notes need to be connected to the original source in a way that makes them findable later, but they also need to capture something more than the source itself – they need to document your thinking in response to the material.

The challenge is that different types of sources require different approaches to annotation. When you’re reading a PDF, you can highlight and comment in the margins. But what about that YouTube lecture you watched yesterday? Or the podcast interview with a relevant scholar? Or the poster presentation at last month’s conference? Where do you keep those notes, and how do you connect them to the original source in a way that’s useful months or years later?

Without a coherent system for literature notes, academics often resort to scattered practices: notes in Word documents disconnected from sources, highlights in PDFs across multiple devices, bookmarks in browsers never revisited, ideas captured in emails or physical notebooks. This fragmentation means that when you need to draw on these sources for your writing, you can’t easily find what you thought or observed about them.

Literature notes solve this problem by providing a consistent approach to capturing your engagement with sources across different formats and media types.

Understanding literature notes

Literature notes are fundamentally about capturing your intellectual engagement with source material. The term ‘literature notes’ might suggest they’re only for academic papers or books, but the concept applies equally to any source that contributes to your thinking – presentations, videos, conversations, exhibitions, or performances.

Key distinction: Literature notes are not about the source itself but about your response to it. Anyone can access the original article or watch the original video. What only you can provide is your particular understanding, your questions, your connections to other ideas, your critical observations.

Think of literature notes as the visible evidence of your thinking while you work through material. When you highlight a passage, that’s information capture. When you write “This contradicts Smith’s framework – need to explore why” next to that highlight, that’s a literature note. When you watch a conference presentation and jot down “Could this methodology work for my survey data?” that’s a literature note.

This means literature notes require a different mindset than many academics bring to their reading. Rather than trying to extract and remember all the important information from a source, you’re looking for moments where the material intersects with your own thinking and work. You’re capturing the points where you agree, disagree, make connections, or generate questions.

What belongs in literature notes

Your understanding of key points

Rather than copying extensive excerpts, capture your summary or paraphrase of important ideas. When you read a complex argument, write it in your own words. This act of translation – from the author’s expression to your understanding – is where real comprehension happens.

This doesn’t mean never capturing direct quotes. Sometimes the author’s exact phrasing matters. But quotes should be the exception, not the rule. Your literature notes should primarily contain your thinking about the source, with occasional strategic quotes to support that thinking.

Critical and explanatory commentary

The most valuable parts of literature notes are your observations, questions, and critical reflections:

  • “But this assumes X, which might not hold in Y context”
  • “This methodology seems problematic because…”
  • “This argument reminds me of [other source]”
  • “Application to my teaching context: …”

These critical comments transform passive reading into active intellectual engagement. They’re also what make your literature notes uniquely valuable – anyone can read the same article, but only you can provide your particular perspective.

Connections to other ideas and sources

Academic work rarely happens in isolation. One of the most powerful uses of literature notes is capturing connections between sources:

  • When Article A reminds you of an argument from Article B
  • When something contradicts Book C
  • When you see an example of Theory D in practice

These links between sources are often where new insights emerge. Your literature notes become not just a record of individual sources but a network of related ideas.

Metadata about why it matters

Context matters for making literature notes useful later:

  • Who recommended this source?
  • What question were you trying to answer when you found it?
  • What project or paper might it be relevant for?

This metadata helps future you understand not just the content but the relevance. Without this context, you’ll find yourself looking at notes wondering “Why did I think this was important?”

Creating literature notes in practice

Reading journal articles

As you read, you highlight key passages using a PDF reader or web-based annotation tool. But highlighting alone isn’t sufficient. For each highlight, add a comment:

  • Summary: “Main argument: social media anxiety stems from comparison mechanisms rather than usage time”
  • Critical observation: “Sample size seems small for these generalisations – need to check if replicated”
  • Connection: “Similar to Wilson’s cognitive offloading but applied to emotional regulation”

When you’ve finished the article, create a more substantial note summarising the article’s contribution, noting strengths and limitations, and identifying how it might inform your work.

Watching presentations and videos

Create a literature note as the presentation progresses, capturing specific points with timestamps: “[15:30] Novel approach to qualitative coding – uses visual mapping instead of hierarchical categories.”

Note your reactions: “Could this visual approach help with my interview data? Need to ask about how they handled overlapping themes.”

The same approach works for YouTube videos, recorded webinars, or podcasts. Include timestamps to make it easier to relocate important moments.

Reading books

Rather than trying to capture notes for every chapter, focus on creating literature notes at the book level and for particularly important sections. Every few chapters, or when you finish, create a synthesis note:

  • What were the book’s main arguments?
  • Which parts were most relevant to your work?
  • What questions or critiques emerged?

This synthesis note becomes your primary engagement with the book as a source, saving you from re-reading the entire book when you need to cite it months later.

Attending conferences

During a conference, creating comprehensive literature notes for each presentation is unrealistic. Instead, capture brief notes during each session. At the end of each day, or shortly after the conference, process these into actual literature notes.

For some presentations, create a proper note with observations and questions. For others, you might realise they weren’t relevant and choose not to create formal literature notes.

Setting up your literature notes system

Choosing a reference manager

Reference managers like Zotero, Mendeley, or EndNote solve the fundamental problem of connecting notes to sources. When you create a note in Zotero attached to an article, that note is automatically linked to the full bibliographic information.

Key features you need:

  • Ability to attach notes to sources
  • Support for different media types (not just journal articles)
  • Reliable synchronisation across devices
  • Reasonable export options (avoid vendor lock-in)

Zotero offers particular advantages: free, open-source, handles various source types, includes web clipper, and allows easy data export.

Maintaining connection to sources

The primary advantage of using a reference manager is maintaining the connection between your thinking and the source that prompted it. This connection:

  • Makes notes useful when you need to cite the source later
  • Provides context when reviewing notes months later
  • Prevents having good ideas but not remembering where they came from

Your literature notes should always include full bibliographic information, either by virtue of being created within a reference manager or by including explicit citations.

Pause and reflect

Reflection: developing sustainable literature notes

Literature notes present a particular challenge because it’s easy to make them too elaborate. There’s a seductive appeal to creating comprehensive, beautifully organised notes on everything you read. But this approach quickly becomes unsustainable. The time cost can exceed the value you extract from them.

Remember: Literature notes are means to an end, not an end in themselves. They exist to support your thinking and writing, not to create a perfect archive of human knowledge on your computer.

Another common trap is treating literature notes as mechanical information capture rather than intellectual engagement. It’s possible to highlight extensively, copy passages, and create elaborate summaries without actually thinking deeply about the material. The highlighting feels like work, but it’s not the cognitive engagement that leads to understanding.

The solution: Focus literature notes on moments of genuine intellectual engagement. Highlight less and think more. When you capture something, ask yourself: “Why does this matter? How does this connect to my work? What questions does this raise?”

Finally, avoid the perfectionist urge to create literature notes for everything you read. Not every article deserves a literature note. Some sources you skim for general familiarity; others you read for one specific piece of information. Literature notes are for sources where you’re genuinely engaging with ideas and where you expect that engagement to be useful for your future work.

Activity

Key takeaways

  • Document your intellectual engagement, not the source itself: The purpose of literature notes is to capture your thinking about sources, not to create a comprehensive record of what those sources say. Focus on your observations, questions, connections, and critical commentary rather than extensive excerpts or summaries. Anyone can access the original source; only you can provide your particular intellectual response to it.

  • Maintain connection between notes and sources: Literature notes are only valuable if you can reliably connect them back to their original sources. Use a reference manager to keep notes and bibliographic information together, ensuring that you can generate proper citations and relocate relevant sections when needed. Without this connection, literature notes become orphaned observations you can’t effectively use in your own work.

  • Use literature notes as foundation for permanent notes: Don’t treat literature notes as an end in themselves. They’re raw material for your thinking – the source material you’ll draw on when creating permanent notes about concepts that matter to your work. The quality of your literature notes directly affects the quality of permanent notes you can create from them, which in turn shapes the depth and originality of your academic writing.

Resources

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