Writing a comprehensive dissertation requires careful preparation, investigation, and composition skills. Establishing an effective note-taking method is essential as you take on the challenging work of writing your dissertation. The quality of your notes will directly impact the quality of your final product, so it is important to ensure that your notes are correct and well-developed. This can help you stay focused and organised.
This guide will review the importance of taking notes for dissertation writing. In addition, in this article, we will advise on how to take useful notes and emphasise the advantages of making note-taking a regular habit. These strategies can help you lay a solid foundation for your dissertation, making the writing process go more smoothly and successfully.
Let’s dive in and explore the note-taking techniques for composing a compelling dissertation.
Table of Contents
9 Tips to Take Notes for Dissertation
It is important to develop a methodical strategy for organising a huge amount of data from different sources. This means that note-taking involves not just copying information but also interacting with the content, finding trends, and developing new insights. Many students acquire services from dissertation writing companies because they lack skills and are unaware of smart note-taking strategies.
After reading this guide, you will be able to write a comprehensive dissertation on your own. Follow some essential note-taking techniques and bravely navigate the rough land of research and writing.
The key points of this guide are:
- Choose a note-taking tool that works best for you
- Take notes as you read
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Include full references in your notes
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Include some direct quotes
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Have a system for differentiating your thoughts from the author’s writings
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Make sure to digitise manual notes
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Organise your notes according to topics and sub-topics
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Integrate note-taking with dissertation writing
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Build mind maps as you take notes
Continue reading to learn more about these strategies.
1. Choose a Note-Taking Tool
Taking notes is a necessary process for beginning the dissertation writing. Just like a research project demands a high level of organisation, it requires a thorough investigation. Note-taking practice allows you to track your progress and ensure that you complete the research project effectively.
To do so, you will need to decide which note-taking tool will suit your working style, learning habits, and research requirements. While some individuals work best with traditional pen and paper, others are more at ease using digital applications. It doesn’t matter what the medium is.
Digital Note-Taking Tools
- Apps like Evernote, OneNote and Simplenote can help you take notes that offer features such as tags, search by term title and easy-to-create notebooks.
- If you deal with scientific papers and articles quite regularly, PDF is an excellent choice as it can be annotated using some applications like Adobe Acrobat, PDF-XChange Editor or Kami.
When you pick a note-taking strategy, consider the following factors. These will help you maximise your output and organise your data to write a better dissertation.
- Select a medium that complements your writing style, comfort level with technology, and learning method.
- Select a format that is easy to organise, categorise and sort through your notes.
- Consider a take-it-anywhere medium to make notes on the go.
- For group work or when you need to consult with an adviser, use a platform that facilitates note-sharing and communication.
Example
Consider a researcher writing a dissertation on how climate change influences the world’s food systems. He/ she prefers to type and needs quick access to the notes on multiple devices. They choose Evernote to take notes. The investigators organise their notes using tags and keywords in separate notebooks for each chapter of the dissertation.
This practice will assist students in the following ways:
- Students can easily search for particular notes and references using note-taking software, which is provided by the Evernote note-taking app.
- The student can follow their research schedule, having set reminders and deadlines for work.
- The researcher can also share the notes and comments with the adviser and research team.
2. Take Notes as You Read
Having a systematic note-taking approach is key to helping researchers grasp and refine literature quickly. The key “Take Notes as You Read” will help you stay productive and focused in your research process. By writing down important points, key ideas, and themes while interacting with the material, you can thoroughly understand what you are learning.
Moreover, you can avoid going through entire articles or chapters by taking notes as you read, which will save you time and lessen the chance of information overload. Having notes for dissertations makes it easier to organise and categorise your ideas, thus allowing you to identify recurring themes or literature gaps.
Example
Suppose you are reading an Article by Angela Li (2024) under the title “The Impact of Social Media on Mental Health in Young Adults”. To write notes while reading, use this format:
- Details of the article
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- Title: How Social Media Affects the Brain.
- Author(s): E.g., Smith and others 2020;
- Published in: Technology and Psychology Journal
- Primary argument
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- The scientists noted that young adults who overspend their time online on social media have more tendencies to show symptoms of anxiety and even depression.
- Results
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- The study revealed that youth spend more time on social media and, as a result, lower their self-esteem.
- Techniques
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- 1,000 young adults aged 18 to 25 years were surveyed for this study.
- A sadness and anxiety measure were created by adding responses to standardised questions, explaining how they used social media individually.
- Restrictions
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- The study also used self-reported data, which can be biased.
- Thoughts and Queries
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- What do these findings mean for mental health interventions?
- How may I further study the influence of social media on people’s health in adolescents?
3. Include Full References in Your Notes
Including full references within your notes is an important way of ensuring that you are being academically honest and that plagiarism will not be tolerated. This method helps you give proper credit to your sources and saves time by requiring less secondary research.
There are even more benefits to including full references in your notes:
- Steer clear of plagiarism
- Use references in future to organise the research
Many students turn to skilled dissertation helpers to write references correctly according to the institution’s guidelines, as they know the right citation and formatting methods. However, the example given below will help you accurately write full references in your dissertation by yourself.
Example
Let’s say you are researching how climate change impacts worldwide food accessibility in your dissertation. Your notes might look like this:
Cited source: Mohamed Ait-El-Mokhtar, (2019) Food security and climate change DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-7775-1.ch004
4. Include Some Direct Quotes
One way to make your dissertation more powerful is by using direct quotes from relevant sources for taking notes, which will add credibility to support your claims. Here is a summary of how to use this strategy successfully and an example to illustrate it.
- Select quotes from credible resources, books, and scholarly journals that relate to your study question or problem.
- Enclose the quoted material with quotation marks to distinguish it from your work.
- Please use a footnote or an in-text citation to give credit where it makes readers aware of the source.
- Use transitional phrases or sentences when you introduce your quotes so that there is a good transition between the ideas.
Example
- If you are writing your thesis on the impact of media use on cognitive health and come across this extract from a paper published in the Journal Of Adolescent Health.
How to use this quote in your notes?
According to a study by Vidal et al. (2020), “Social media use has been associated with higher levels of depressive, anxious or lonely symptoms esp. among adolescents and young adults” correctly stated.
5. Have A System for Differentiating Your Thoughts
When you are writing dissertation research, it is important to develop a method for distinguishing your ideas from those of other authors that can maintain academic integrity and avoid plagiarism. This is where uniqueness occurs, and if you properly know how to cite original writers, it makes it more reliable.
Pay attention to maintaining a clear separation between your thoughts and the author’s words when taking notes for the dissertation so that it is easier for you, as well. You can also use a note-taking template to identify and label. In addition, you could use a colour-coding system that allows you to highlight one colour in your notes, one for the author’s writing and yet another for transcriptions of any direct quotes.
If colour coding is used, every colour must have a key to keep everything aligned and prevent confusion later.
Image Source: 9 Note-taking tips for PhD research
Example
| Author’s Words | Your Thoughts | Direct Quote |
| “Rising temperatures are projected to decrease global crop yields by 2% by 2050.” | This statistic is alarming, but how does it vary by region? | (Smith, 2020) |
6. Make Sure to Digitise Manual Notes
There are pros and cons to using pen-and-paper methods in combination with digital technologies. The pen-and-paper approach facilitates greater mental clarity. It is also easy to add notes, such as thoughts or observations. However, written notes can get lost.
Moreover, one of the downsides to pen and paper is that it can be hard to find stuff. Searching hundreds of pages looking for one item. Conversely, you can see anything with the ctrl + f function in digital media indexes.
Example
For a dissertation on the effect of weather change on the global supply of food, this would look like:
Manual Note: (Hand-written on paper notes)
- Climate change and world food production
- Crop production losses from warming temperatures
- Changes in precipitation trends affect irrigation
- More frequent extreme weather
Digital Note: (Using Evernote)
- Global Food Production and Weather Change
- Keywords
- Intense weather events, precipitation scenarios, production of food patterns and crop yield global climate action plan
- Take note
- Food production on a global scale is greatly influenced by climate change. Higher crop yields occur as temperature rises whereas changes in precipitation patterns affect irrigation practices. Compounding the issue is the increasing frequency of extreme weather.
7. Organise Your Notes by Topics and Sub-Topics
Instead of organising your notes by authors (as per our approach in annotated bibliographies) or dates, it is recommended to categorise them under topics and subtopics. This strategy will also help write the proposal or even the dissertation. You do not need to spend time flipping through the notes, looking for relevant information on each of the subtopics in each chapter.
Example
- Introduction
History of the study, Problem Statement, Objective of the Study, Rationale and Significance.
- Literature Review include
Abstracts of previous studies along with literature gaps.
- Methodology
Study Plan, Sample Size, Data Collection Process, Data Collection Tools, Outcome Measures.
- Analysis
Analysis of data, Interpretation of data.
- Results
Graphical representation of data, Tables and Figures.
- Conclusion
Summary of your research findings.
8. Integrate Note-Taking with Dissertation Writing
Organised note-taking is an essential key in writing the dissertation. It helps researchers streamline their thoughts, conclusions, and ideas systematically. Thus, leading to a well-structured dissertation. Here are the guidelines that one should follow about taking notes in writing a dissertation:
- Choose a method of note-taking.
- Set up a system of taking notes.
- Use a standard notation format.
- Revise your notes regularly.
- Put notes in categories.
Example
A researcher is conducting a study to find out how social media impacts mental health. An example of how they would annotate the above text:
“The study by Vidal et al. on “Social media use and depression in Adolescents”
Summary: Use of social media increases adolescent depression, a report finds.
Study: Investigate the Impact of social media to identify causes of depression and suicide
Technique
- Through a series of conversations, the team came up with the research question.
- The search was done on the PsychINFO database.
Outcomes
We investigate four themes from this study:
- Amount of use of social media
- Quality of use of social media
- Social factors of social media
- Impact of social media on cognitive health
9. Build Mind Maps as You Take Notes
A mind map represents the way different concepts are connected. As you are creating the mind maps, gather the sources into their annotations for ready reference. However, if you find it difficult to build maps while taking notes for your papers, you can purchase a dissertation online from reliable platforms. But you can also do it easily by just following the two ways given below.
- Digitally using open-source and paid software for specific operating systems (e.g., SimpleMind Pro on MacOS).
- Use pen and paper to write handwritten notes for the dissertation
Example
How to Organise Notes for Dissertation?
By organizing your notes into groups, you can outline the main sections and then the paragraphs of your research paper.
- Read your notes again after taking them.
- After that, rearrange them by grouping related information.
- Go over the subjects covered in your recently organised notes.
- It’s possible that, in the process, you took notes that don’t directly address your working thesis or address your research topic. So, you do not need to add them to your dissertation.
Conclusion
Taking notes is probably the most valuable stage of thesis writing. Whenever the dissertation writer writes pen down the notes, all the critical information will dictate the route of the future investigation. Notes are crucial to the process of writing a dissertation because they prepare the writer for the important step of incorporating information into the paper and avoiding overlooking critical information.
Overall, writing down ideas, thoughts, and observations allows the writer to conduct a well-organised and well-researched paper that rightly conveys the research results. In this guide, we have discussed the guidelines under which scholars can ensure that they make accurate and detailed notes, thus providing a strong foundation for their dissertation.
The inescapable one is to get good notes; doing good research is a skill that requires practice, creativity, and dedication. In the end, by learning the strategies of taking notes, researchers can write a comprehensive, convincing and in-depth dissertation.
