I’m a veterinarian who is specialising in zoo medicine. So I have to study a lot of different species (I have a notebook for each), and within those species, a lot of different diseases, besides other relevant topics. Im trying to keep things more or less organised by having a note with name and general info about a disease and then a lot of child notes for the agent, the clinical signs, the treatment, etc.
When I do my first reading I go through 10 to 20 diseases in one go, and I excerpt all this data in order, so it’s easy to then organise by disease in my mindmap. But at the moment I’m having to then go manually node by node giving them the respective titles. Is there a way to select a bunch of nodes and add the same title to all of them? Or should I be doing this differently? Image to show what I mean.
My other question is also about this workflow. When I go back to study and review all of these notes, I need to study by species, but I also need to do it by system/class (like cardiovascular or infectious) and by disease, so I can correlate all this information in my head, like disease x affects all these animals, and is treated this way in most of them except these, is always diagnosed like this, etc.
So I thought the best way to do this would be using tags, so I can search by “avian influenza” or “lead toxicosis” at a later date for example and come up with all the information I have on these, spread through all my species-specific notebooks. Again, does this sound like a good idea?
And when I tag a node, is there a way to have all present/future child notes receive that tag as well automatically? Because at some point, some diseases will have a lot of tags like infectious > bacterial > gastrointestinal > salmonellosis etc, and I worry that having to do this manually each time will lead to some tags being missed, or that instead of being able to read my source text uninterrupted I will have to be constantly organizing my data in the mindmap which is also not what I want.
Interesting to see how another veterinarian is using the application! I am a large animal internist - I don’t use MN to study, really (residency long behind me!) but I use it in planning and preparing teaching for veterinary students, interns, and residents. I started using the application very recently so am far from a power user at this point, but I suspect it canNOT do these things you are hoping. I may be wrong so will be following this thread.
One thought on the titles question - how about just using the color system for this and not titling at all? I am lazy so individual editing of each note sounds like a way to procrastinate from studying! Been there, done that. Once you decide which color is for what, it will be obvious at a glance what each excerpt relates to. You can decide this while excerpting or change it after the fact while studying.
As for tagging, you can batch-tag in the Outline mode. I don’t use tagging but it is pretty easy to do on the Mac. I think doing it in iOS would be a nightmare, but again I might be wrong as I am relatively new to this application and use the Pencil on my iPad and keyboard on my Mac. But for more comprehensive tagging it might be easier to take your notes out of MN and into something like Evernote. That would also be a much better and safer repository for long-term access and use of your notes in future once your training program is over, and it may be easier to read/review there also. Plus you could impose additional structure there such as individual notes, notebooks, etc. It will also OCR images and handwriting. I am a heavy user of Evernote and have about 20,000 notes I’ve accumulated over my clinical career - all instantly searchable and far more convenient to use in the clinic than MarginNote. I call it my “external brain”. Any time I need to look anything up, if there’s any chance I’ll need that information in future I make a note of it in Evernote. Then when the time comes I don’t have to do another lit search to re-find the same information - I have a summary in Evernote that I can find with a quick click.You can export all or part of your outline to Evernote, and with or without your mindmap and documents. I think this would be a REALLY cool long term repository for clinical learning (rather than leave all your hundreds of hours of work trapped in MarginNote - especially if it is discontinued one day), and wish something like this had been available during my training programs! Best of luck to you and I will watch comments from others with interest.
Once you decide which color is for what, it will be obvious at a glance what each excerpt relates to. You can decide this while excerpting or change it after the fact while studying.