Sam Wallace has an interesting post on how he takes research notes. He’s a Mathematics PhD student so he reads lots of papers that he has to take notes on as well as class notes and his own research projects. The post is an explanation of how he leverages Emacs and Org-mode to organize his notes and workflow.
He mainly uses Org-mode, reinforced with CDLaTeX, to take his notes. His approach was inspired by Gilles Castel’s post, My Mathematics PhD research workflow, which is similar but uses Vim instead of Emacs to tie everything together. I’ve written about Castel and his astounding Mathematics note taking procedures before.
The interesting thing about Wallace’s workflow is that although he uses some external tools and packages, such as Zotero, Org-noter, and ivy-bibtex, it mainly rests on Org-mode. Org is an excellent way of organizing notes and research no matter what field you’re in but Org’s built-in LaTeX support augmented by CDLaTeX for efficient entry makes it particularly well suited for Mathematics.
If you’re a PhD student or researcher, you really should take a look at Wallace’s and Castel’s posts. They’ve both got a lot of good ideas on how to get organized.