Using Notion for Ph.D. work
One month ago I started my Ph.D. fellow position at Aarhus University. During preparation for my applications for Ph.D. positions, I put as a tech-savvy person already a lot of thoughts into the perfect technical setup for managing an individual project of this size. With the technical setup, I do not mean which software I would use for data analysis since something like this depends highly on the upcoming research. I wanted to find some software in which I could easily document my literature analysis, the overall management of the project, and also something where I can easily write and connect information with each other. Especially for handling systematic literature research — something nearly every social science researcher starts off — I did not find a good tool to have on the one hand a database-like overview and search function across the notes and on the other hand the opportunity to take structured notes in detail. I was actually thinking together with a friend about programming something like this on our own.
Thankfully I talked with my brother Martin one day about my issue and he directed me to the notetaking tool Notion and I fell in love directly. Especially the simple design options for the notes as well as the use of the “/” sign for commands got me directly. Those features give me the feeling that I am not notetaking, but more programming my thoughts into the software. Also, the use of icons for identifying pages with one look at the icon triggered me.
For sure I am completely new to the research business and I organize myself to my best knowledge and belief. I will see in the upcoming years if my system works the way I imagine this now or if it will adapt completely. But for now, I would like to show how my system works and it will maybe give some inspiration to other Ph.D. fellows or researchers.
Access to Notion
I use Notion in the Mac environment through the Desktop application. It offers quite easy and sleek the same features in its desktop and web app. Concerning the different plans offered by Notion, I have the Personal Pro that is luckily for free to education mail addresses. Just as a heads up: I do not use the team function at the moment and did not try to coordinate any reviews through Notion yet.
Structure of Notepad
The structure of my notepad grew organically over the time I developed the idea for my Ph.D. project and in the first weeks. I separated three different main notebooks:
- The Ph.D. Project notebook includes all background information and is completely concerned with my domain research.
- The Ph.D. Courses notebook inhibits all the content from the courses I attend during my fellowship.
- The Writing notebook is at is says for writing :) The first piece of advice you receive is “Start writing as early as possible”. I will try to do this to lose the fear of writing and publishing my thoughts.
- (Aarhus Planung was my little helper to organize moving to Aarhus)
Let’s get deeper into the structure of the most important and most interesting notebook: The Ph.D. Project.
Content of Notepad
The most important stuff at first: Deadlines and important ToDos. I used this inline table to be always aware of what needs to be done in the next weeks. The view at the overview page is filtered to show only the items that are classified as “Not started” or “Ongoing”. In the structure overview on the left side, you can see the full table on the second level.
The research proposal depicts my ongoing work on my research designs and shall help me to not lose the overview of my research topic. In the Ph.D. program of the Aarhus University, it is required to hold a presentation and write a report about your research progress for the whole department every year. Your presentation and report will be discussed by two department members and gives you external feedback on your research. I already attended some of those presentations from others and created some notes on what to look out for when preparing it.
I track my daily progress in a daily productivity log to on the one hand visualize my progress to myself and stay motivated. I make one entry a day and document the things I’ve to organize, meetings attended, what I’ve read, what data I’ve analyzed, and what I was writing. On my supervision page, I document any kind of questions or remarks during the day I want to discuss with my supervisors. Like this, I have often a whole list to go through during my supervisor meetings.
In my current phase of research preparation, my literature overview and the systematic analysis of the texts are most important. On a full table page, I collect all information to the texts I read and for every text, a new page is created.
The created page consists of a template for a systematic literature review. I found this structure during my Master's thesis in a guide for systematic literature analysis — unfortunately, I do not know the source anymore. I used the Template feature from Notion for inserting the structure into every page. Until now, the template never let me down in catching the essence of every research paper. Concerning the methodology literature, I created an additional page with a different structure, since the methodology literature is rather structured like guides for researchers.
Based on the read literature, I create also a list of researchers that are also doing research on my research topic and track them in a small list. I often have a look at further or more current published work of them and also shortly have a look at their area of the department and therefore their domain interest on the topic.
The following page with the title theoretical contributions depicts the transfer effort from the read literature. There I collect the relevant information read in the literature aligned with a high-level categorization of the content through sub-pages. An integrated board from miro helps me to categorize the read literature contentwise.
As the last element, I started to create a database for corporate accelerators and corporate incubators that I fin during my literature review. Although I am currently not in the phase in which I would need to research possible organizations and contact persons, I try to prepare this work and stretch it already in the present to make it less annoying in the future.
What Do I miss from Notion?
The analysis of literature needs to be transferred at one point into a real text and academic writing. For sure it is easy to create texts in Notion — but I actually miss some more elaborated spell checking at this point. An integration of Grammarly would easily solve this issue.
For the actual writing of seminar work, the automatic insertion of citations misses as well. Word offers there integrations of all well-known citation collection and eases this administrative process up easily. But since this feature is only required for academic writing, I am quite sure that Notion won’t integrate them as academics are not the main target group.
What I don’t use Notion for
For sure, there are several functionalities that Notion is not suitable for, but which are necessary for writing a thesis:
- Citation collection: I use currently Mendeley for my citation database due to the nice database from Elsevier already integrated and the easy import function of new citations.
- PDF collection: Dropbox helps to keep all PDFs in one place and through the desktop integration I can easily refer to them through the PDF feature of Notion.
- Data analysis: Since I am currently not in the phase of data collection and analysis, I will see if and how Notion can support me on this in the future.
I hope that my example of Ph.D. project management gives maybe some other Ph.D. student inspiration in how to manage their own project management on this huge amount of work.
