It can be tempting to highlight everything that strikes you as important while you read, but try to resist the impulse and limit yourself to highlighting around 10-20% of the text. Highlighting or underlining is one of the quickest and easiest ways to do this. So, you’ll want to keep track of what new ideas you glean from it and which sections might be important later on. Why highlight or annotate at all? When you read a text for a paper, your end goal is to use its insights in your own work. But what’s the best way to keep track of the most important ideas and passages as you read? Should you use highlighters like I did? Should you take notes as we suggested in this previous blog post?īelow I’ll discuss different highlighting and annotation methods and then present five different approaches you can use with the reference management program Citavi.įirst things first: what should you annotate? Now the fun begins! You can start reading and analyzing the articles. Then, you can weed out the ones that are irrelevant to your research questions or that have dubious origins. Using your information literacy skills, you'll also take into account additional criteria when evaluating the sources you found. While doing this, you’ll also check to make sure that the journal the article appeared in is legitimate. And digital highlighting wasn't any better, since then I had even more colors to choose from.įortunately, there are ways to highlight and annotate your academic texts in a much more useful way.Īfter you've performed a database search and found a few scholarly sources that could be relevant for your paper, you'll want to take a good look at their abstracts, tables of contents, and outlines.
But I did feel guilty whenever I noticed that I hadn’t really understood the text but had instead been focusing on the process of highlighting. I absolutely loved marking up my readings with neon pink, yellow, and green markers.
Do you have any academic guilty pleasures? During my studies, I certainly did: highlighters.
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