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."

Comments

pen and paper

[intermodal]

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.

Re:pen and paper

[Frobnicator]

Totally agree, PENCIL + PAPER is the answer.

Do you want to spend your time swapping between apps, waiting for apps to load, trying to draw with your laptop's touchpad, and otherwise concentrating on the technology rather than concentrating on the discussion?

If you want to review your paper notes and make them digital at some point after class, that is up to you. But for simple flexibility and reliability, paper is the answer.

Write on it. Draw on it. Re-use it in another class. Archive it. Paper does all the things asked for in the article.

Re:pen and paper

[eggstasy]

I concur. It's worked pretty well so far, why would it need to change...? Is there a specific problem you're trying to solve?
Do bear in mind, from my own painful experience with note taking, you should try to actually pay attention to your class. It's different for everyone, but I found excessive note-taking counter-productive. That's what people did before they had easy access to all the information in the world.

Also, get off my lawn you damn kids.

Re:pen and paper

[larwe]

This. Not only this, but the OP is seriously underestimating the workload overhead of tagging CONSISTENTLY, and adding all sorts of meta-information to documents. It's an analogous problem to tagging a huge collection of photos. This is a picture of my dog. Is it a #dog, a #fido, a #poodle, or what? It's extremely hard to maintain consistent tagging rules for a large body of individual notes. As for digital note taking, there is no solution that works as well as paper. In the course of EE studies, I have tried everything under the sun. Tablets, PDAs, laptops, digital ink pens, etc etc. If you're taking lots of text notes, a keyboard is king... but probably no faster than handwriting. If your notes include diagrams, mathematical symbols, chemical formulae, etc, you can pretty much forget keyboards (though I have seen some Mathcad mavens enter math proofs "live" off a whiteboard since they know all the keyboard shortcuts for everything). Stylus-based screens don't have the resolution nor the responsiveness of paper. The best solution I ever reached was paper notes which I then scanned, so I could carry all my notes on my laptop/tablet. Forget about this frankly OCD-sounding desire for neatly aligned banks of metadata-encrusted Faberge eggs of notecraft. It's far more important to focus on listening to what the hell is going on in the lecture, and comprehending it, which oftentimes means participation back the other way to clarify points being made in the lecture. You won't be able to get that clarification offline studying at home. If you are studying to be a clinical professional, focus on the skills that further that goal. Wasting effort on the Quest for Perfect Electronic Notes is a more appropriate activity for someone whose goal is, say, clinical informatics specialist. In summary: Grrrrr.

Re:pen and paper

[intermodal]

Amen and amen. Excessive note taking means, in my experience, missing half the class.

Re:pen and paper

[K. S. Kyosuke]

It's an analogous problem to tagging a huge collection of photos. This is a picture of my dog. Is it a #dog, a #fido, a #poodle, or what?

That's why ontologies and inference engines were created. Anyway, if the application doesn't at least offer semi-automated tagging, it's so 20th century (talking of text, of course - pictures will have to wait).

Re:pen and paper

[Colonel Korn]

Totally agree, PENCIL + PAPER is the answer.

Do you want to spend your time swapping between apps, waiting for apps to load, trying to draw with your laptop's touchpad, and otherwise concentrating on the technology rather than concentrating on the discussion?

If you want to review your paper notes and make them digital at some point after class, that is up to you. But for simple flexibility and reliability, paper is the answer.

Write on it. Draw on it. Re-use it in another class. Archive it. Paper does all the things asked for in the article.

OneNote and a tablet with an active digitizer is searchable pencil and paper. It's not any more cumbersome than a notebook but it's far better for finding old notes.

Re:pen and paper

[Anonymous Coward]

Learn shorthand. Get a good pen to avoid writing fatigue, I always preferred a mechanical pencil for mistakes(staedtler http://www.staedtler.com/en/products/pencils-accessories/mechanical-pencils/graphite-925-mechanical-pencil/#id=256&tx_solr%5Bpage%5D=1) ...that one has metal grip and cap w/ plastic tube. It will last for years and years.

Don't go smaller then .5 lead it breaks too much(.5-.7). Use a soft lead(B-HB, don't use F-H)to avoid writing fatigue/tearing paper, and it's easier to erase since you aren't pressing as hard. ...and a tube click eraser, use the one in the pencil cap for backup.

I always used graph paper(thin 3 ring binder) which allowed writing and technical drawing. Just don't get too fine of grid(such as EE paper). You can download images and print your own if you can't find anything appropriate, this may be most appropriate as you can size the grid to you writing size.

As to the computer... you won't have time. The great thing about a 3 ring binder is you can rearrange later if needed, e.g. take 1 thin binder to school, arrange the different classes/notes in their own bigger binder later. Your back will thank you.

Re:pen and paper

[gmclapp]

I recently finished my degree in Mechanical Engineering. The way I found to be most efficient was to use a pen and paper and subsequently scan the notes. Then, for each of my classes, I had a folder for notes. I would put the scanned copy in all of the classes for which it might be relevant. Not just the one for which they were explicitly for.

Re:pen and paper

[Russ1642]

Is that going to be on the test? Should I write it down? Ok.

Re:pen and paper

[Russ1642]

The best pen for avoiding fatigue is a fountain pen, unless of course you're a left handed devil worshipper. You barely have to touch the page.

Re:pen and paper

[camperdave]

Whatever you do, GET A SYSTEM.

For years was taking notes with paper and pen. I used the four color BIC pen; black is for titles, section headings, etc. Blue is for main body notes. Red is for references and underlining, and green is for activities, suggested reading, etc. I would also recommend the Cornell notetaking system. Also get some good notebooks so that you're not going to lose pages.

The problem with paper is searching for information. Using a system like Cornell will help for searching, but nothing beats an electronic search. For that, I'd recommend Microsoft OneNote. OneNote lets you have audio, video, text, clipart, and screen captures on the page. You can even insert documents from Word and Excel. You can arrange notes hierarchically, and cross link notes from other sections. OneNote allows collaberation. Although, I have not tried it (due to not having a tablet PC), you can even hand-write notes a-la pen and paper. OneNote can OCR this for you so that you don't have to try to read your own handwriting - a bonus in my case.

Re:pen and paper

[CanHasDIY]

A class is made for you the understand the subject topic.
Only note something once you've understood it.

Some students still haven't grasped this, which is astounding.

Not everyone learns the same; I find that I don't fully understand a topic until I've written my notes, looked at them, and gone "oh, shit, now it makes sense!"

Many educational facilities haven't grasped this.

Re:pen and paper

[CanHasDIY]

Ummm... how am I supposed to take notes if I skip the class alltogether?

Take someone else's?
How about the teacher's? Surely you realize he already has notes and could make copies of all he is going to write to all students. As a matter of fact, a lot of teachers do it, it's called duplicated notes.

You must've missed the part where I talked about writing my notes. See, it's not reading them that ingrains the information, but writing it down for myself. Otherwise, yea, fuck paying for class, I'd just buy the teacher's edition of the book.

That makes no sense. Whatsoever.

I'm sorry, there is nothing I can do if you can't understand simple English.

Says the guy who completely misinterpreted my plainly written post. Pot, kettle.

Word of advice, dude - try to actually understand what people say in their responses, before you get all butthurt and reactive. Not everyone who replies to your posts is taking a shot at you.

Re:pen and paper

[thebrieze]

Livescribe. It's amazing. (http://www.livescribe.com/en-us/)

It is Pen + Paper, but everything written down is also digitized, searchable, synced to evernote etc. The pen is also a time synced voice recorder. When you go back to your notes (if you recorded the audio), you can tap on any word, and the audio corresponding to that point in time will start playing. You can now even start taking additional notes as the audio is playing. This can simplify your note taking to mostly just marking bookmarks, and noting your own thoughts, instead of transcribing what is being said.

While the paper is proprietary, the cost is quite reasonable, and it is possible (fully supported by Livescribe) to print your own. They are not operating on a Razor/Cartridge business model.

If you do not need wifi sync, you can get the Echo pen for really cheap, Look for the refurbished 4GB or 8GB Echo pens on the Livescribe site.

Re:pen and paper

[larwe]

I'm going to go out on a (thick, short, sturdy and eminently defensible) limb here and state that automatically tagging, categorizing and usefully retrieving free-form input is a strong AI problem; the results you get out of any solution are probabilistic, and the stats of today's solutions are low.

Re:pen and paper

[asliarun]

Ummm... how am I supposed to take notes if I skip the class alltogether?

Take someone else's?
How about the teacher's? Surely you realize he already has notes and could make copies of all he is going to write to all students. As a matter of fact, a lot of teachers do it, it's called duplicated notes.

You must've missed the part where I talked about writing my notes. See, it's not reading them that ingrains the information, but writing it down for myself. Otherwise, yea, fuck paying for class, I'd just buy the teacher's edition of the book.

That makes no sense. Whatsoever.

I'm sorry, there is nothing I can do if you can't understand simple English.

Says the guy who completely misinterpreted my plainly written post. Pot, kettle.

Word of advice, dude - try to actually understand what people say in their responses, before you get all butthurt and reactive. Not everyone who replies to your posts is taking a shot at you.

I would mod you up if I had points. I completely agree with you (and I'm not even sure why the previous commenter even got pissed!).

The purpose of taking notes is to distil what we are reading or listening or observing, and then noting it down on paper in a way that makes sense to us. The act itself has merit as lack of speed (and even laziness) forces us to quickly assimilate what we are hearing or seeing, and write it down as efficiently and quickly as we can so we don't fall behind in a lecture. More importantly, it forces us to think through the topic and formally defining it in our own terms.

I even argue that the best note taking happens when we are constrained by limited amounts of note paper. If I have only one page for an hour long lecture, I will really try hard to note down what I think are the important bits or the bits I would most likely forget.

The point really is not to compress the content from say, a hundred pages into one page - I really see the act of note taking as the act of learning itself.

Sure, I'm sure others have different and probably better ways of learning. However, this works for me and I haven't discovered a better way.

One Note?

[Andrio]

See subject.

Re:One Note?

[adonoman]

This would seem to fit. When you search in OneNote it'll give you a list of all the pages that have that search term (including UCRing images, and searching through recorded audio).

Re:One Note?

[smittyoneeach]

Emacs. Org mode. Long after One Note goes the way of Bob, Emacs will chug on.

Re:One Note?

[ericloewe]

I'll add my two cents for OneNote.

Pen & eraser input on tablets that support it (Surface Pro, for instance), OCR, handwriting recognition, speech recognition... And it's relatively easy to use.

Microsoft OneNote

[lw54]

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.

Xmind

[Tsiangkun]

Xmind.net

*golf clap*

[MagicM]

A wonderfully creative way to post a slashvertisement for Microsoft OneNote. Well done.

evernote +1

[alen]

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

Lab books and mind-mapping software maybe?

[gstoddart]

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.

Use paper and pen. Scan later to pdf

[vivek7006]

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

Paper, Pen, and...

[wjcofkc]

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.

Re:Paper, Pen, and...

[gstoddart]

. I know that's kind of like wrote rehearsal, which is considered a bad study habit, but I disagree with that philosophy (wrote (sic) rehearsal = good).

Except what you're describing isn't rote rehearsal. The act of synthesizing your notes from multiple sources into a coherent thing actually causes you to think about what it all means and understand it in a broader context.

Me, the one and only time I decided I was going to cheat on an exam, by time time I wrote up my notes containing the information I wanted and had it all laid out the way I wanted -- I didn't need my notes. It was like studying works or something. ;-)

Rote rehearsal is just memorizing without really thinking about what it means -- and you can't easily rearrange, summarize, and cross reference your own notes without thinking about the meaning of it.

Re:Um...as a patient, I'm hoping you MEMORIZE it

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not studying a doctor, but I've never had any trouble cramming information in my head. Despite that I take detailed, copious notes in a very organized and thorough manner. That's part of HOW I cram the information in my head.

I guarantee you, as a patient, you have NO idea how your doctor studied in med school unless you also have a personal relationship with your doctor. Being "scared" about this is just mindless and insulting.

Re:Um...as a patient, I'm hoping you MEMORIZE it

[K. S. Kyosuke]

The doctors that I've known have been able to cram away a lot of information in their heads

Exactly, that's why they never have sizable libraries in their offices.

Remember the one hour equals three hours rule.

[rjforster]

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.

45 lecture hours plus two all nighters

[peter303]

Seems to have been my actual rule :-)

Take notes with emacs

[WarJolt]

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.

get a fountain pen, a good notebook, and good ink

[SuperBanana]

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.

Re:Um...as a patient, I'm hoping you MEMORIZE it

[Anonymous Coward]

>> I'm just starting year two of medical school, and I've been rethinking the way I make and create notes/study guides

As a former medical student (and now practicing physician), I'm amazed you're going to class in the second year. It may sound like a joke, but at my medical school, the entire second year class could not fit into the auditorium at the same time....people just stopped going, and relied on the note taking service and read their books or the syllabus provided for the class. I guess if you're in a PBL program it may be different....but then your material is already organized that way (see below for PBL)

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...

Meh....you learn a lot of junk in the first two years of school. Its like learning to rivet and weld so that you can fly a plane....yeah, it's nice to know, but most pilots don't need to know it. The problem is, to be a good doctor you need to know a lot of specialized information, that requires understanding of basic material. Since you don't (can't) know what you're going to specialize in in the future, they fill your head with what we think a doctor should know. As time and training go on, you forget a lot of the information that you don't use (and don't need to know). But a lot of it is still there....I amaze my residents by recalling tidbits I learned 10 years ago and never saw or used since...that's what makes a good physician a great one.

And as far as sitting in class and memorizing it....I will just tell you that you have no idea of the volume of material that is poured into medical students. Which in and of itself is a problem, but you also (as mentioned) need to mentally cross-reference the material to other lectures over several years. Part of this is why they have been doing problem based learning....instead of teaching anatomy, physiology, microbiology, genetics, pharmacology, pathology, neuroscience, and clinical medicine as separate classes, they now teach a cardiology core where you learn heart anatomy, heart physiology, heart microbiology, heart genetics, heart pharmacology, heart pathology, heart neuroscience(lol), and clinical heart medicine, followed by the pulmonary core....etc

Re:Um...as a patient, I'm hoping you MEMORIZE it

[Russ1642]

The best doctors are the ones who are experts at looking things up. The ones that think they already know everything because they went to med school are the ones to be worried about.