Literature Notes
Literature Notes are the notes that you take while you are consuming information. The major difference is that while taking literature notes you don’t just copy paste ideas. You must either paraphrase what you find interesting or useful.
Source of the information can be anything from a book to podcast to blog posts. Literature notes doesn’t have to be fully about what is inside the premise of the book you are reading. It can be personal responses to the information presented by the author.
In a physical Zettelkasten system, like the one maintained by Luhman, Literature notes are kept inside the [[ Reference System ]] linked to the Reference Note. Sonke Ahren’s suggests a reference managers such as Zotero to store your references and Literature Notes. Use of Zotero is advantageous to Academic Writers as it readily outputs the meta data of your reference well formatted.
My implementation
Since my personal Zettelkasten System is built using digital tools my implementation of Literature Notes is slightly different. If I am taking the Literature Notes from my kindle exports, the note that contains the exported highlights will be treated as a Reference Note.
In other cases I use a section inside the Literature Note itself to serve as the Reference Note.
I don’t use Zotero in my work flow as for now as I am not too comfortable with it. I manually type in the reference information to my Literature Notes. For those you are interested in Zotero can be integrated into major note taking apps such as [[ Obsidian MD ]], [[ Roam Research ]] and LogSeq.
How all this adds up.
As you consume knowledge and make your literature notes it is possible you to have new ideas. If they are just random idea snippet it will end up as a [[ Fleeting Note ]], while the more serious and coherent ones will feed your Zettelkasten as Permanent Notes.
Also read: Taking literature notes from online sources, Should you take literature notes in a single note
Return to Understanding Zettelkasten or Home Note or Zettelkasten
Hey there, my name is Rahul Rajeev and thank you for taking the time to read through my digital garden. This garden is a raw reflection of my explorations - so all the information shared here are versions of my own experiences and assumptions.