Evernote for Academics: Day 06 - Research Workflows

We finally made it to Day 6 of the Evernote for Academics series. Today I will briefly cover some ideas that you can use in your research. Tomorrow, I will have a guest post on how one student uses Evernote in her research workflow.

Using Evernote as one central hub when doing a research project is one of the most powerful and useful ways that I use Evernote. I find the combination of the ease of getting things in, searching, and availibility on all my devices the perfect combination when using Evernote.

Getting Your Research Into Evernote

In a previous post I discussed a variety of ways of importing anything and everything in Evernote. Today I want to dive in a little deeper and look at some specific ways that I find helpful when conducting research.

One of the keys to my research workflow strategy is only importing items that are pertinent to research. This means I make liberal use of the Evernote clipper when dealing with PDFs and other articles that are already on my computer. Instead of importing the whole resource I clip the sections that I want to use. This way when I am writing I am not bogged down searching endlessly through pages and pages of writing that I will not use. I created a video in a previous post showing how I use Skitch for this purpose.

Below I will cover to more methods that I use to get specific information into Evernote.

Mobile App

I find the mobile app to be indespensible in my research workflow. It allows me to digitize my physical books and articles quickly and easily. Along with easily being able to get pertinent copies into my notebooks it also allows the ability to search these documents as well.

The mobile app has a camera feature that allows you to capture high quality images of both typed and written work. You could use the default camera on your phone but using the camera feature within Evernote tends to produce higher quality images for documents and allows you to quickly make a new note on the go. Once you have captured your image you can annotate it within the mobile app for future reference.

Often times I often prefer taking hand written notes when reading. Evernote has the ability to capture your hand written notes via the camera and create a searchable note (premium users only). It is suprisingly accurate. I don’t have the neatest hand writing and I still find that it is able to search my notes with a high degree of accuracy.

Saving Kindle Highlights

One of the most useful features of the Kindle is the ability to search through all your highlights at once. You can access your highlights via the web by going to https://kindle.amazon.com/your\_highlights.

Once I get to my highlights I use the Evernote web clipper. Once I find the highlight(s) that I want to import I use the “screenshot” option and then crop the pertinent section.

Conclusion

Today I covered some methods that I find helpful for getting specific research into Evernote for later. Tomorrow our guest post will feauture how one student has developed a specific workflow for research. Stay tuned! It is a good one.