In this video, I walk through how I take notes when I’m reading research papers during my PhD. I’m a third-year accounting PhD student at the University of Waterloo, and note-taking is basically the difference between “I read it” and “I can actually use it later.” The goal isn’t to copy the paper into your notebook—it’s to extract what matters for your own research and make it easy to find again when you’re writing. I focus on building notes that are searchable and reusable: what the paper is asking, why it matters, what data/method it uses, and what the key results actually mean. I also talk about keeping a consistent structure so that when you come back weeks (or months) later, you don’t have to re-read the whole thing just to remember whether it was relevant. If you’re doing literature reviews, preparing for comps, or just trying to stay on top of weekly reading, this is the exact workflow I use to turn papers into a personal “research library” of notes I can trust.