# Card-style Notes
ivySCI Notes is a tag-based card-style note-taking system.
Card-style notes originated from the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann used a card-based note-taking system to write 60 books, accumulating over 90,000 cards. He would add around 6 cards to his collection every day.
The card-style note-taking system is based on three fundamental principles:
- Each card is atomic and only records one idea.
- Cards are interconnected.
- Reviewing is more important than the act of note-taking itself.
ivySCI has optimized the card-style note-taking system for academic papers. Let's explore it together.
# Recording a Text Note
When you come across important viewpoints, conclusions, research methods, or other significant sentences in a paper, you can highlight them with your mouse and click on the highlighter to extract them.
Highlighting is just the beginning. We need to write down our thoughts: why this sentence is important to us. And we should assign a tag to this note. Tags are crucial, and we will share more about them later.
# Recording an Image Note (Screenshot)
If there are important charts or formulas that you find valuable and want to refer to in the future, you can click on the screenshot icon in the top right corner, capture the chart, and save it as an image note. Similarly, we can also record our thoughts and add a tag to the note.
# Literature Remarks
If you want to write down your thoughts on the entire article, you can record them in the literature remarks. When you read an article, you can find the literature remarks below the article information.
The recorded remarks will be prioritized and displayed in the details when you browse the article entries (in "Recently Read" or "Literature Management").
# Note Tags
Without tags, all notes would be scattered and unable to be connected.
With tags, notes are automatically categorized based on their tags. This allows us to obtain two important pieces of information:
- How many categories the notes are divided into.
- Which notes are interconnected within each category and which articles they are associated with.
# Project Notes
By using project notes, we can display all note tags and the notes associated with each tag.
Through project notes, it becomes easy to organize reading reports and paper writing outlines.