Nope, I am not talking about managing references. How does one keep track of the articles one reads, make notes and summaries on them etc? With endless articles to read, I just don't know how to keep track and I keep forgetting the stuff I read months ago. Endnote and Refworks seem very good for managing the references but I hate using them to make notes; that functionality in both these software seems rudimentary at best.
Thanks in advance.

I've said it before, but Mendeley does all this and more. Yes I know it's a reference management software, but it allows you to highlight text and make notes and search everything simultaneously. You can see when you uploaded articles and see which ones you haven't read yet. You can sort stuff into folders as well if you want. It's a great free resource.

Bear in mind you can never remember everything and you shouldn't try to. As long as you can find it when you need it, that's enough.

Have a look at Pocket. You can open folders for different aspects of your research, and save all online articles into appropriate folder, and write a tag on each article to remind you why it was relevant

Throughout the PhD, I organised articles into folders on my computer by theme and wrote a brief summary of each one I read (and I mean very brief- just three bullet points or so). I would then print these summaries and keep them in a physical folder.

When it came to write up, I would look through this folder to remind myself of any relevant articles to cite. It worked very well for me!

Google Raul Pacheco Vega - he has a great blog and demonstrates this spreadsheet he's designed in which he organises readings thematically, with column for the main point of each, his critiques, study site, etc

I have similar question - just starting my PhD and I tend to take copious notes and mark quotations in a notebook when I'm reading texts. I have set up a spreadsheet to track the titles/books/papers etc I read and can cross ref them by theme/topic, but what do people do with the notes themselves so they can find them again? If I note a good quote in a book on a particular theme, what's the most efficient way to find it again in say 3 years time. I can think of two ways - first, in my books record note key topics I found in it, so I can then at least narrow down which books quotes or notes on that topic will be in, but if I've read 20 books that all contain elements of that theme, it's a lot of notes to read through again. Alternatively, I can type up my notes and categorise them by topic, so at a later date I can simply filter them. The first approach seems to involve lots of time later, while the first lots of time at the start. Any thoughts on which approach is best? (my thesis is historical/theoretical, so I'll be doing a lot of reading!)

Many thanks,

David