File
Healthy sleep duration, MMWR 2016
Select a sentence in a PDF and press Ctrl+Shift+Q. The quote lands on your board with its page number.
Keep every quote with its page number, and lay out your reading until the argument is clear.
Search finds your quotes, clipped pages and the words inside screenshots without tags. Every quote keeps its source and page.
For Windows · Free during the beta
Example board · Essay research
Quote
Insufficient sleep impairs cognitive performance
— Healthy sleep duration, MMWR 2016, p. 1
Quote
sleep duration was obtained by self-report
— Healthy sleep duration, MMWR 2016, p. 4
Report 3 items
Web clip · wikipedia.org
Memory consolidation
How a new memory becomes stable over the hours and days after it is made.
Screenshot
Map from the CDC report
Web clip · wikipedia.org
Spacing effect
Study spread over several sessions is remembered better than one long session.
Web clip · wikipedia.org
Testing effect
Recalling what you studied helps you keep it longer than reading it again.
Sources 4 items
Note
Essay question (example)
Does sleep after studying help people remember more? Start with the CDC report, then the Wikipedia overviews.
Note
What I have so far (example)
About two in three adults report 7 hours or more. Short sleep is linked to worse thinking (p. 1). The survey asked people; it did not measure their sleep (p. 4).
Checklist · 2 of 4 done
- Done: Read the CDC report
- Done: Quote pages 1 and 4
- Draft the outline
- Read the spacing effect sources
Document
Essay outline (example)
Outline for the seminar essay, about 1,500 words.
- Why sleep might matter for memory: consolidation.
- What the CDC survey says about how long adults sleep.
- Its limit: people reported their own sleep.
- A small study I could run.
Notes 4 items
Note
Does sleep help recall? (example)
The question the essay has to answer.
maybeLinked to the next card: maybe
Note
Method idea (example)
Two groups learn the same word list. One sleeps, one stays awake. Test both the next day.
Open question 2 items
The real app
A quote from page 3, recorded on Windows.
Above is an example board drawn on this page. Here is Field Notes itself, with a CDC report open at page 3. Select a line and choose Make quote card. The app says the quote card was added beside the report on its board, with page 3.
If you've ever re-opened twelve PDFs to find which one said it, this is for you.
PDFs in folders, highlights locked inside a reader, quotes pasted without page numbers, web sources that stop loading.
Another night re-reading papers to find a page number.
How it works
Drop in your PDFs and clip the pages you read.
Select a passage and press Ctrl+Shift+Q.
Lay the quotes out, draw the links, and export the citations.
Scanned PDFs without selectable text cannot give quote cards. Citations are files for a reference manager, not formatted bibliographies.
Quotes from PDFs and web pages keep their source. Export them as citations your reference manager can import.
Pages you clip from now on keep a full copy on your PC when the page allows it, so they still open after the site changes them or takes them down.
Put shapes, headings, checklists and dashed "maybe" lines beside your quotes, then let Arrange ▸ Mind map arrange them along the lines you drew.
Watch the tour
1 min 18 s · with music · captions in the picture
Example
You're writing chapter 2. You select a line on page 4 of a paper and press Ctrl+Shift+Q; the quote lands beside the PDF with "p. 4" under it. By Friday you have twenty quotes from six sources in one corner of the board, a dashed line to the one you're not sure about, and a checklist of what's left. You export the citations and every quote is in its note, with its page.
- No account to make.
- Your notes are files in a folder on your PC.
- Works beside your reference manager.
- AI is optional and can run on your PC.
- Free during the beta.
Apply for the Windows beta.
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