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Ask Slashdot: Best Software For Med-School Note-Taking?
First time accepted submitter spencj writes "I'm just starting year two of medical school, and I've been rethinking the way I make and create notes/study guides. One of the problems I've considered is that we learn about the same topic in several arenas. For example, if I consider some disease like coronary artery disease, I will likely learn about this topic in cardiology, radiology, pharmacology, and then in outside study resources such as Kaplan guides, online resources, etc.. Further, it will come up in August, October, March, April, etc.. My dream app is some combination of Excel, Visio, Word, and a blog where I could tag selections of text. If I then 'filtered' by certain parameters, it would collapse all the information I'd collected from different resources. For example, say I create a flowchart in Visio, take some notes in Word, create a table in Excel, and save from text from a web resource. I tag each item with 'coronary artery disease,' then I want to quickly query for all of my items with this tag. Is there any kind of app or resource that can pull this off? Medical students everywhere would be grateful."
Nothing I've yet discovered is as flexible, reliable, and controllable. every digital attempt I've seen/tried has been inferior. You might try recording the lectures as you go in case you need to go back for context at some point, especially if you go back and type them later.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
See subject.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
Since you're needing to record info from Word, Excel and Visio, OneNote would be perfect to consolidate the information in place. You can also include images, video and webpages.
DevonThink or Evernote?
You could try a Wiki
Xmind.net
A wonderfully creative way to post a slashvertisement for Microsoft OneNote. Well done.
>> I'm just starting year two of medical school, and I've been rethinking the way I make and create notes/study guides
You're scaring me dude. The doctors that I've known have been able to cram away a lot of information in their heads, and note-taking wasn't one of their problems in year two of med school. As a potential patient, you have me worried already...
I've been using Evernote and it is pretty rich for setting a base hierarchy. Then, you can set all manner of tags and search on them. But, you have to be diligent to make the system really work for you.
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
http://mnemosyne-proj.org/ This is an excellent program flash card program. You rate flash cards by how well you know them and it does automatic scheduling. Cards you know well show up less often than cards you don't know. You can include images and sounds. It has a good tagging system so you can mark a card for multiple areas. You choose which subjects you want the cards to cover. For example, you could look at all your cards on coronary arteries regardless of subject, or you could look specifically at coronary arteries for one particular class. The key to getting the most out of this program is to include questions that cannot be answered with memorization. Include flash cards that force you to explain the why and the what.
There are 11 types of people, those who know unary and those who don't.
Surprisingly one of the few things a Surface Pro is good for.
A simple hack is to use fairly unique labels which will turn up in a file system search, e.g. |tag:coronary|.
Then index your file system. (Spotlight on the Mac is particularly good, Windows Search is ok).
Flamewars aside, Org mode is my latest love when taking notes and organizing my life. Collapsable text, easily inserted hyperlinks to web pages and documents, it's almost wiki-like. It worked well for me in law school, but some of my friends really liked OmniOutliner (and a few other programs from that same family of sofware).
you can write your own notes and tag them
you can clip websites and news articles as well and tag them
60MB per month for the free account and $45 per year after that. and it works on a computer, phone, tablet
http://www.livescribe.com/en-us/smartpen/echo/
Get an Office365 SharePoint subscription. create all the tags and metadata you want. Fully searchable.
Me, I've used those standard black lab books for my note taking for my daily work for almost 2 decades, and it's tough to do better. At least, for me it is.
You can always write your own mind maps or some kind of wiki later ... but, for the first pass, nothing is more flexible than pen and paper notes since it supports multiple languages, terminologies, and creating diagrams. No upgrades of licenses to worry about. ;-)
And a lab book has the advantage of being hard-covered as well as being pretty obvious if pages have been removed (which is why they use them as lab books in the first place).
Technology has all sorts of failure points and limitations. And most alternatives to pen and paper either have in-built limitations, or in the long run are harder to actually keep your notes with.
I'm not saying you shouldn't look at some technology to see if it helps, but for me, good old fashioned bound paper notebooks are still my preferred way, and look to remain so. I've got a stack of about 40-50 to them that I periodically refer back to.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Especially with all the drawings/figures and equations, its best to use paper and pen. Buy a good quality scanner and scan all your notes into pdf at the end of the day. Tablets/laptops jdont work because they actually slow you down. Also, I feel that taking notes with pen/paper help me stay focused during lectures
It sounds more like you have been tasked (or have tasked yourself with) designing a library. Why do that when what matters is what is in your head? To that end, order the info in whatever format makes it most convenient to eventually memorized. If you are writing it down just to have it, you should just buy the books.
The text is a tag - just keep your files in a directory, and use that search box in the upper right corner. Man I feel like Wil Wheaton.
My favorite way to study in a situation like yours is to first take my notes the old fashioned way: with paper and pen in class. I then take those notes, along with applicable textbooks, and manually compose them in whatever software makes sense, typically LibreOffice Writer. The act of first taking notes the old fashioned way, and then cross referencing with the textbook, while in turn creating a highly refined set of notes in an application, strongly re-enforces what I am studying in my brain. I know that's kind of like wrote rehearsal, which is considered a bad study habit, but I disagree with that philosophy (wrote rehearsal = good). Plus the act of composing more highly refined notes from your originals takes it one step beyond that.
Past that, I really don't think there is a single application that will filter all your notes automagically into so many different formats.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Something that I always tell prospective physicians before they get in too deep to change. At year two, you haven't gotten in so far financially that you have to continue. You still have time to change your mind.
A physician in Iowa (where the Board of Medicine conducts 'blatantly sub-par investigations' according to the Iowa Court of Appeals).
... are very interesting for collecting, relating and analysing such kind of complex data from several perspectives. Many integrate nicely with other bibliographic tools. High quality free/open source and propietary solutions are available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-assisted_qualitative_data_analysis_software . Furthermore, they may be very useful for your future research ;)
Create a MediaWiki for yourself, and crossreference as you go? I did this for my MBA 5 years ago, and it worked wonders.
This signature can save you $400 on your car insurance!
I suggest TiddlyWiki. It's an HTML file you can open/edit in any browser -- although Java OS restrictions force you to use Safari on Macs. On Windows 7 the latest Chrome works too, I think. You need to download the tiddlywiki htm file, and a little Java helper applet for the file i/o. Take notes in plaintext or use simple a markup for formatting (bold, italics, bulleted lists, tables, etc.). I use it for my engineering work. You can cross-reference, tag, and search quickly. Insert JPGs directly into the page. Neat stuff. And you're not stuck with one OS.
I know the last thing you need is another project while in med school. You may have an opportunity though for a new product by partnering with a software developer who can build an app to your specs. I have been contemplating Apache Lucene as the indexing engine for an app that is similar to your needs. As a med student that reference may not mean much to you, but to a dev it does. You could work together on it and when its ready-for-primetime, you may have another source of income after med school by selling the app to med students.
In the meantime, the mind mapping software offers a good working solution. Find one that allows you to connect to different file types (spreadsheet, doc, pdf, etc). The downside is that it may not have any indexing capabilities for later searching. You may have to link all the coronary artery disease references by hand to one map as you create it or update it. If there is a mind map software product that allows indexing, then you may have your solution already made.
... I suggest you try to ensure you get handouts and then devote 100% of your concentration to listening and interpreting what you're being told.
If you write things down, you won't look at 90% of it. You will need it all in your memory at some point - either for the exams or when you're practising, so better commit it to memory in the first place. And, no, writing it down does not help with that.
My only warning is never to believe 100% anything anyone teaches you - no-one knows everything about everything, and the evidence and research is always changing.
Check out TreeDB Notes (http://www.mytreedb.com/treedbnotes_free.html). Offers just about everything you asked for but it takes a learning curve. Nice thing is you can make internal links that go back to other notes/trees/external sites. This allows you to keep your specific classes separate but still have easy links to each other. There is also a search feature to pull up keywords. Myself I have used this for school, work, knowledge base articles, recipes, customer specific info, etc. Each subject is in its own tree with sub headers as needed and links that bring together information (like knowledge base info to a specific customer).
I have been using their free version for about 5 years now and I have made it portable (can be done after an install) and keep the portable version and database in my dropbox (will be moving to Tresorit soon) so I can access it from any PC I am at. It would be nice if there was an app for it but since I do not use it on the go it has not been an issue.
As a researcher (patient) studying the social practices of doctors (visiting their offices), my tentative conclusions are that the industry-standard note-taking practices are currently: 1) a web browser; 2) open to WebMD.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
For this kind of application I can't think of anything better. OneNote is probably the best note taking app out there and the surface pro and a real digitizer and a digital pen so you can take good notes with it.
I picked up a galaxy note 8 for my engineering classes (since it also has a digitizer) and for what I do it works very well. I would have gotten a surface pro except that they are so much more expensive.
For any class where you have drawings it is hard to beat a tablet with a real digitizer. I used to type all my notes and that was harder to do as my engineering classes ended up with more and more diagrams. I also did not want to deal with pen and paper anymore since it is so hard to deal with it, find stuff in it, keep track of it, share information etc.
You can also look at other windows 8 tablets (NOT windows RT) and find ones with real digitizers (preferably wacom) and digital pens. There are some lenovo ones that are supposed to be nice.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
I was told this when I started at university but it took me until my final year to truly grok it.
Each one hour lecture should take 3 hours of your time. One hour in the lecture itself, one hour within the next day or two (at most, ideally same day so things are fresher in your mind) when you annotate the notes you had taken, redraw bad diagrams, look stuff up etc. Don't hope or expect to get 'perfect' notes from the lecture itself. Then finally one hour before the exam to go over that hour of lecture time.
As others have said, pen and paper is king for that first hour in the lecture itself. Anything you try to do with technology should concentrate on the second hour.
A smart-pen along with ever-note have been great for law school. It digitizes your paper notes and allows you click a section of notes to go directly to that part of the lecture.
Seems to have been my actual rule :-)
For capturing the information during class, go with a fountain pen and paper. Particularly for multi-hour classes, a good fountain pen (~$30) can ease hand strain and fatigue. Focus on concise notes and diagrams that summarize the information. Often hand-outs will contain the information you need to memorize. Then, get a good scanner and document management platform. I used Devon Think (http://www.devontechnologies.com/products/devonthink/devonthink-pro-office.html) for organization of case files in law school. After scanning and OCR conversion, I let it create logical links between files. In this way, I did not have to worry about creating meta-tags or manual linking. Yes, I did go back in and create links later, but most of the time the automated routines worked. Yes, it will take time to learn in the beginning. Budget about eight hours to start over the course of a few days. The rewards are there if you are willing to invest in the program.
Most graphs formulas and daigrams are in the book or available online. I take notes with emacs and search with grep.
I've thought about using a corporate wiki like confluence to take school notes, but didn't want to shell out $10 a month.
Or a camera, or better yet, that your class have a camera that takes everything and publish it later in youtube or a students portal for everyone there. You can take the notes later, don't mess your attention fiddling with a touchscreen keyboard, a bulky notebook or switching apps.
Also, getting an antivirus warning in a medical class will be pretty embarrasing.
I would add: Get a decent (~$100-200) fountain pen, good quality notebooks, and quality ink.
Waterman makes the Expert 2 and is a pretty safe recommendation, but there are a bunch of others out there to try. Note that fountain pens should be held extremely lightly against the writing surface, and are not really ideal for occasional use if you live in a dry climate. For daily or bi-daily use, they'll be fine.
Clairefontaine sells notebooks with superb paper that is very smooth, strong, and thick enough to not bleed through to the other size...and sells proper cloth-covered, stitched-binding notebooks.
Noodler's Ink has "bulletproof" varieties which will not run or bleed from almost any common solvent or bleaching agent, making them quite ideal for labs and such (or if you simply drop your notebook in a puddle.) Doubles as a very good ink for signing important documents.
Please help metamoderate.
Answer: OneNote is the ultimate note taking app and I find its layout to be far more my liking than Evernote. Evernote actually repulses me graphically. It is actually the main app preventing me from moving over to Linux Mint. Libre Office suffices in place of Word and Excel, but nothing out there comes close to the power of OneNote. Listen, extremists, I'm sorry I am endorsing a Microsoft product! OneNote 2003 can run under WINE except for a few things that are trivial to me (search up the WINE compatibility database -- very useful). OneNote 2013 will not run under WINE for a *long* time, I'm sure. Only Windows flavors of OneNote are worthy of the name -- the iOS & Android varients are not good. Try to keep all comments relative to note taking software, so this fellow gets his problem solved.
Take the notes in whatever program works best for the material, and then store them in dropbox, or similar, and use the tagging functions from the online service. Don't worry about tagging as you take note. As have been stated, you're better of focusing on the material.
At the end of the day, or week, go back and tag all your notes in the online storage. This will add a review, and help you keep your tags consistent.
"The Brain" software is a pretty interesting 3-D mind mapping software and supports tagging and linking. The have a free single user version - http://www.thebrain.com/
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
http://treesheets.com/
Emacs org mode
It sounds to me like you are approaching this from a 'coding' (as it relates to social science or qualitative research). There are some software packages that can do some (maybe all?) of the things you're looking for. An example of this is NVivo.
Check out "Notebook" from Circus Ponies. Available for Mac and iOS.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
This sounds like a natural fit for mind mapping software. While normally touted for brainstorming activities or connecting free form thought. It can be used to associate the related but varied sources of information the questioner is asking about. And there are various offerings available on Windows, Mac and Linux.
Embed documents, links, etc. Tag them. You can search by tag or keyword. The free version is solid. There are also applications from the same company that will allow you to digitize and search your handwritten notes.
mindjet manager is a tool that let's you create this sort of thing and attach files and links.
As an engineer who then went to med school my advice is to worry less about the note taking and more about what the lecturer is saying. Take very few, very selective notes, mostly about things you realize you don't understand or will require rote memorization. No need taking notes on material the average high school graduate should know. Up till now you have probably been able to master every topic by brute force studying. No more. Now it's time to learn to think.
I also prefer to use a fountain pen, but here in Britain they're not sold only as expensive fashion accessories (though there's certainly a market for that).
So, save $80-$180, and buy a good quality fountain pen from eBay.co.uk or eBay.de. I have a couple of "Online" ones, and they're fine -- one was £3 (probably because it's an ugly yellow colour) and the other about £10.
(I still have the one my mum bought me when I started secondary school. Still works fine! I use it at work. It was "Made in West Germany" and everything...)
Get a Lamy Safari fountain pen for around $25. No, it's not heirloom material, but it has a fairly wet and smooth nib. The pen is bullet proof (or at least durable enough to get you through your studies without breaking). Get a cartridge converter and a bottle of Noodlers ink. That will be enough to last you a few years of intensive writing.
Then, when you graduate, then get an expensive pen. I'd recommend any pen by Visconti. You'll have earned it by then.
What you want is http://treesheets.com
Snip:
The ultimate replacement for spreadsheets, mind mappers, outliners, PIMs, text editors and small databases.
Suitable for any kind of data organization, such as Todo lists, calendars, project management, brainstorming, organizing ideas, planning, requirements gathering, presentation of information, etc.
It's like a spreadsheet, immediately familiar, but much more suitable for complex data because it's hierarchical.
It's like a mind mapper, but more organized and compact.
It's like an outliner, but in more than one dimension.
It's like a text editor, but with structure.
N-dimensional x-referencing will mess up your head, don't do it and don't try to do it, no matter what hightech gadgets you have access to.
To be honest, for this problem - especially because it's so n-dimensional - I'd deliberately choose *not* to use hightech but to stick with quality notebooks (Leuchtturm are my favourite) and a good pen/fountain pen (Lamy is my favorite) and rely on spacial memory ("Roughly where in notebook was I when we had that lecture?") which relates 1 to 1 to the sequence of your curriculum. You can use colored markers and sticky-tabs to sort things out when rehearsing/prepping. Once a notebook is full you even can get cute and write the contents table (Leuchtturms all have one + numbered pages).
This may seem low-tech, but nothing bets that when you have to memorize your stuff by heart and have to be able to recall it in an exam. You'll find stuff much faster than by using some computer UI. ... Let it be 10-30 notebooks when you're finally a medical doctor. So what? You can still photograph each page and digitally store it and metatag those images later on if you want to through them away someday. Or you can pay someone to do that. And do use top quality notebooks and pens. They are fun to use and take the boredom out of taking notes!
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Whatever first method you choose, go over the material multiple times afterward to cement facts and relationships in your mind.
If you choose to go the "paper and pen" route (which I love, being a fountain pen user), I strongly recommend purchasing a copy of Nuance voice dictation software. The price is steep for the medical version (strongly recommend over the "professional" version for vocabulary's sake), but by reading your notes aloud (and recapturing your material in an electronic form), you will be able to not only cement the written notes, but also to supplement them with SPOKEN RECOLLECTION of the lectures and lab study.
Dictation is where it's at!
Mnemosyne is free and there are versions for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. You won't need to tag anything. You'll actually remember everything.
A wonderfully creative way to post a slashvertisement for Microsoft OneNote. Well done.
calling the parent post a slashvertisement is a pretty clever way of getting around the problem that OneNote is very good at what it does.
well done.
I'm building a web based notebook system called netelligence which works well for my students. It's still in beta, has been for a year, but allows you to create and share notebooks and add in hand drawn images, photos, written notes, tables etc, even contacts, dates, appointments, youtube videos, etc! It also has a bookmarklet to allow you to grab web links and store them on your pages. If anyone wants to try it out it is at http://www.netelligence.co.uk/Netelligence2013/ and is free.
The best software that I've ever used for storing and retrieving information is Folio Views. You can easily find information in your notes, or, you can have textbook amounts of information as well. Since it indexes all the text, finding something is almost instantaneous, rather than a front to back, word to word search, such as in Acrobat reader or Word.
I'm told that v4.8 will allow import of pdf files, though I am still using 4.2 in a virtual machine running Win2K.
I recommend the Galaxy Note 10.1 and an app called Quill. Quill is amazing. I agree with some of the posters here that most every attempt an app has made to match pen and paper was inferior till I tried Quill. I've been using it for a couple months to storyboard and write. Which I used to do with a composition notebook and a pen. If you check out the xda forum about Quill you'll see a lot of students recommend it as a note taking application and have asked the developer to add audio recording. I would imagine you could just record in another app simultateously which wouldn't be too hard since you can have multiple windows open on samsung tablets. Quill is a relatively unknown app. I went through and downloaded every pen writing app I could find on the android market including paid apps. Quill is only .99 cents and everyone I've show it too has said it's just like pen and paper but it's better cause you can erase and switch colors and insert images. I highly recommend it.
Google for desktop wiki.
Zim is one. Basket is another.
Very good programs for note-taking. You still need pen and paper to draw.
I've found Scrivener to be invaluable in my law practice. See http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php.
It's available for Mac, Windows, and Linux (currently in beta). You can take the notes in whatever format or program you like, bring in PDFs, images, media files (such as dictation or lecture recordings), etc., and organize them as part of a Scrivener project.
Scrivener is extremely robust and offers multiple ways to view and organize your notes (such as in an outline or as notecards on a corkboard). You can choose what information gets compiled into a document for printing (such as an outline of a particular topic) and apply different formatting without having to change the source formatting. It's also great for handling endnotes and footnotes.
Pen and Paper. At the end of the semester, scan all the notes to a multi-page PDF on a per-topic per-class basis.
I use Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/) to keep track of all my notes. You can add whatever file to it and tag it with keywords (e.g. cardiac hypertrophy, NFAT, SRF) that can be used to filter the results using one or more of the keywords. I use the standalone version and local storage only, but there are plugins for web browsers and options for cloud storage.
Agreed. I have a $5 Chinese-brand fountain pen and a $45 Lamy-brand fountain pen. It depends on the paper type, but on most paper I actually prefer the Chinese one.
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
Let just say I wouldn't have passed my exams without it.
I do some lawschool teaching as an adjunct professor. Basically that means I'm a practicing lawyer who teaches one class a semester for fun. (My fun that is. Whether my students enjoy it is an entirely different issue.)
I see students who are obsessed with constant note taking. My sense is they are not following the class discussion. The students I am confident about, have done their homework and made notes before hand and are following along on their laptop. They have their notes open to the material we are discussing, maybe another window open with the court decision we are discussing, plus a copy of my overhead slides open in a third window. They are NOT making constant notes. They take some notes, but not constant notes during class.
If you are taking copious notes during class, I'd be wondering why the hell you didn't do the reading beforehand like you were supposed to.
Microsoft OneNote stored on Microsoft Skydrive.com which will give you instant backup at the NSA.
No, seriousely, checkout OneNote storing your notes in the cloud.
Being now several years beyond medical school and well into practice I would caution any medical student to use their time *exceedingly* wisely. The demands of study and work will rapidly outstrip your time. This is a classic case of "study smarter not harder".
I would agree with essentially most of the comments here: use pen and paper for efficiency, figure out a way to keep it in some sort of order (manilla folders, black subject notebooks, etc). 3x5 cards are your friend.
Keep in mind that the pace of new information will render obsolete a LOT of what you will learn the lecture hall within a few years. PubMed, UpToDate, and other online resources are your friend. Keep current. Religiously read well adjudicated review articles. When you come across difficult or interesting cases, pull a couple good articles and write your own case report. Minimize the time spent in the housekeeping aspects of learning. And remember.. you'll be doing this for the next couple decades. Travel light, travel swift... And never forget that you are not "fighting disease" - you are caring for your patients. Keep your heart will all diligence...
Good luck!
M.D. in N.Y.
I took most of my degree notes with a battered Sheaffer Imperial Flighter which is about as old as me but still writes beautifully. Today I'm never without my Pilot Capless.
Many folks at my job swear by MindJet. It can do everything the poster requested- integrate MSOffice docs, PDFs, notes by keyword, association, etc.
I am not a medical student. However, keeping records of multiple projects, on a wide variety of subjects is a challenge I face. As others have indicated, paper and pen is hard to beat. But digital searching/tagging of my notes is a really useful feature. I have a Livescribe Echo, I am able to take notes, and record meetings. My laptop automatically synchronises with Google Docs, and I have a tablet PC with a stylus. It means that whatever option I use.... tablet or paper.... it all ends up in the same repository. I am thinking about using Evernote instead, it seems to have a great deal of features that Google Docs/Drive does not have.
Have a look at Freemind etc.
You will retain much much more information if you take handwritten notes in class and then re-write them a number of times into various formats such as outlines and notecards. It's a time-proven method. It beats all techno-gadgetry hands-down.
As someone who got through med school because of this...
An good Asian mate who has neat handwriting....goes to all the lectures and very obsessive... and is willing to let you photocopy all his notes for a few beers (unfortunately for him he couldn't really tolerate alcohol really well either).
I am one of those other disgraceful Asians with really bad handwriting, and all my notes ended up being thrown away as they generally don't make any sense once out of the lecture theatre.
Get yourself an Apple MessagePad!
I found that doing the pre-reading gives a rudimentary understanding of the topic so you know what to research. A summary explaining each point goes into your Study Notes with a longer explanation of points you didn't understand.
Your question related to Class Notes that are best notes on parts of topics you missed and a list of required research.
The type of information rich, linked document you want to create is more appropriate if you were lecturing on the subject matter.
Study Notes: The summary you review at the end of the year/term/semester
Class Notes: Explanation of parts of topics you don't understand and points to research on your own time.
At worst, always do the pre-reading so if you need to ask a question you can demonstrate *some* understanding of the underlying issues and briefly state either (1) the parts you *do* understand or (2) the leads you've researched that failed to resolve the question.
Regards Sinesurfer A Nerd is someone who lives for technology, A Geek is someone who lives for technology and loves it
The first question is whether your notes are nearly all pure text or whether your notes include mathematical symbols, diagrams or pictures of some sort. If it's the latter, then your fastest, easiest, most flexible, lowest overhead input method is still pen and paper. If you go this route, get a good fountain pen and good quality paper. A fountain pen, unlike a ballpoint, can write with near-zero pressure, which means you can you can write for much longer before your hand starts to cramp up. That's a major advantage if you're sitting in classes taking notes for hours at a time. Good quality, inexpensive fountain pens include things like the Lamy Safari, Faber Castell Basic or Pilot Metropolitan. If you want to go up market a bit from there, I'd suggest having a look at the super-cool looking Namiki Falcon. Top quality paper means Clairefontaine or Rhodia (which are both owned by the same company). Leuchtturm is not quite as good, but still quite good and less expensive. The downside to pen and paper comes at the back end, in that you can't sort, search, copy and paste etc.
If you'd rather take notes on a laptop, then, like other commenters, I'd suggest Emacs Org Mode. Despite its intimidating reputation, learning the basics of Emacs is actually pretty easy and you need to know only a tiny percentage of the capabilities of Emacs in order to use Org mode. You can pick up those basics in 30 minutes and lots of people do useful work with Emacs without ever learning more than that. The upside is that Org Mode can do everything you describe, it's as customizable as any software you'll ever encounter and it stores everything in plain text mode that will always be accessible, not some proprietary binary format that will be unreadable if the software vendor ever goes out of business. Besides the initial learning curve, Org Mode (like any software) requires a bit more overhead effort on the front end compared to pen and paper, but you get your reward at the back end because you'll be able to search, sort, copy, paste, and slice and dice your notes however you like.
Personally, I'd go with Org Mode unless the nature of your notes (e.g. lots of pictures, flow charts etc.) makes keyboard input impractical. Even then you could consider Org Mode for the text plus pen and paper for the occasional picture/diagram, then scan the picture/diagram to pdf to include with your Org Mode notes later.
If you're interested in Emacs / Org Mode, then "Learning GNU Emacs" (3rd ed) is a bit old but still the best book out there on Emacs. Get that book plus download the Org Mode manual and maybe the latest Emacs manual from the FSF and that's all you'll need.
Asciidoc is a mark-up similar to markdown but with tons of extra features. You can export to html, pdf, docbook, epub, latex and postscript.
It can create an index for you based on your mark-up and this will take care of your tag issue.
Asciidoc website: http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/
Asciidoc mark-up cheat sheet: http://powerman.name/doc/asciidoc
It reads like you're on Windows so my solution may not be ideal, but I just use symlinks to have essentially what you've described.
Getting through med school will require you memorise a lot of stuff. You need a system of note taking that promotes that. I didn't go to med school, but I did do a related degree. We did a lot of anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, etc. What worked for me was to write notes during the lecture with pen and paper. This is way more flexible and faster than messing around with tablet or laptop. Then, after the lecture, transcribe and make the notes neater and put into a binder for storage. Cross-reference with a textbook when producing the final copy of your notes to fill them out. This process cements the knowledge in your head because you *think* about what you learned. It really helps to make it stick. I found memorising my own notes was easier than memorising a text book.
soylentnews.org
It's mainly for text, with the capability for other inserted but non-indexed objects (images, charts, etc.), but check out RedNotebook. (http://rednotebook.sourceforge.net/) It's also available as portable software.
Some insights from someone that lived through an unsuccessful pen-based (stylus) tablet invasion at my university. Too many things can go wrong with technology to make digital, hand written note taking "better" than pen and paper. You can type WAY faster than you can write, or should be able to unless you are wicked fast at shorthand. It doesn't take much effort to organize class notes physically if you use spiral notebooks for each course; pick a color and stick to it for that course, label the cover with class and semester, etc.There is evidence (I was told) that the act of writing information down does require cognitive functions to engage that help you remember and process information. Redundant backups of digital information become critical. Battery life and availability of charging locations in classrooms may be more of a challenge than superficially perceived. And the list goes on-and-on, mostly against using something other than pen and paper. It's the reason tablets weren't everywhere when HP, Toshiba, Fujitsu and the like had them ten years ago. Sure, the handwriting recognition has gotten better as well as the precision of the pen-based input, but still not better. Tablets in education are a solution looking for a problem.
Pen and paper is just not searchable enough. Use laptop and and a text editor, so you can search the text. I keep an online lab notebook, chock-full of how-tos, references, and other things I would otherwise have forgotten long ago. Going on 14 years now, it has been a lifesaver many times over. Would never give it up.
When I was in Medical school back in the early 80's we had a 2 lecture services that printed out the days lectures verbatim for every course. Also, an audio tape was available from the library. But the real answer to your question is how do you learn best, in detail. If you are still struggling with that this is going to be a rough year. Personally, and I'll admit I was considered odd for this, I never went to class. It just drained me because of all the distractions and the energy it took to take notes and listen at the same time. Also, almost ever professor misspoke about some fact in every lecture, and contrary to what one responder said about the value of the lectures, the tests were based on the facts in the textbooks. So what I did was to read the lectures to just see what was emphasized, then read the text book 2-3 times depending on what grade I was aiming for. In the first read of the lecture notes and textbook chapter I would stop on any concept or function I didn't really understand and access other resources if I need to, usually that was another classmate. I am a visual learner so my notes were marked up in 3 different colors with boxes, underlining, highlighting etc. That was the way I pared the massive amount of information down to the essential facts that had to be memorized. As I used to say to my classmates who asked how I could possibly pass without going to class "There is no shortage of data, only time to digest it". p.s. getting the old tests is a huge help. Best of luck.
I would say you'd want to keep it as simple as possible. Your motivation will wax and wane. So keeping it simple will keep friction low.
That applies to the note-taking system you have (use as few as possible), the workflow you use, as well as the volume of stuff you try to include in your notes.
Also, you would want to keep the format such that it is easily portable. So you don't lose time having to port your notes from one format to the next.
After years of studying and notetaking (I finished med school over 10 years ago and still studying... it never ends), I settled on using plain text for most of my study notes (via Notational Velocity), and I use Evernote for everything else (charts, figures, photos, tables etc).
I will say, for the longest time, I was using WebIdeaTree... but I had to abandon it after I moved to Mac. 5 years after my transition, that is still the one piece of software I wish I had on my Mac. So if you really want to use a proprietary format, that's what I'd recommend.
Lastly, remember that you can't know everything, and you certainly can't remember everything. So be selective and don't try to write a textbook. When I studied for my specialist exam, my notes became more detailed than many of the textbooks - which, believe me, was NOT useful.
I'd suggest trying One Note. You can record lectures in it, and include text and excel charts. I'd suggest making a different not for each topic. It won't be as searchable as you'd like, but if you take your notes in a well organized fashion I think it would fit your needs.
Use a wiki. You want to e able to search for stuff, and reorganise as you learn from different sources. I hear Connected Text is good on windows. Add links to diagrams, and whatnot as needed.
Creating *useful* study notes is difficult. Obviously generic products like EverNote & OneNote allow you to store a lot of information you deem important. Often though, these tools end up with lots and lots of individual notes which makes efficient revision difficult. Ideally, when revising you would spend the majority of your time re-reading notes about concepts you don't fully understand or aren't able to recall quickly. Often though, we'll consciously retain most of the knowledge in our notes and we spend a large amount of time re-reading about things we already know.
Wouldn't it be great if when you revised a topic you only had to study the concepts you hadn't fully learnt yet? Well that's what the Leitner box system is for. It ensures you learn *efficiently*.
Tools such as Memrise - Learn something new everyday and http://iknow.jp/ are creating excellent learning courses that embrace the Leitner system: which identifies that learning takes place through progressively less frequent repetition.
At http://evergrok.com/, we're experimenting with the Leitner system approach on a personal level, by using personally captured notes (not courses) organised in a simple, beautiful way. We think it's the most efficient way to study, learn and *retain* knowledge.
The professor should organize the class so that most of what you might write down is already available online (or in handouts). Then you can take short notes on paper that help you organize and remember what you're learning.
Livescribe is clearly the right tool for the job, although it has a few limitations. Files are a proprietary format, though you can convert to bitmap PDF or (with moderate accuracy) text. Pen can only keep track of four notebooks of each type, so once those are full there's some kind of archiving I haven't tried yet.