Roam for Academia: Four Ways Roam Research Transforms Academic Workflows

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Are you an academic, or working in a knowledge intensive field? If you’re reading this, you’ve probably heard whisperings (or shouts) about a strange series of phrases —things like “knowledge management system”, “second brain”, “roam research” — and you’re wondering what the hype is. I’m here to tell you: the hype is real.

You probably know that Roam Research is an app, but you’re wondering what the deal is. Thankfully, there are some excellent introductions to Roam you can find on Medium and elsewhere. So rather than just describing what Roam is, I want to dive into some specific examples of Roam in action to show how effective it is for academics and those in knowledge-centric professions. We’ll review Knowledge Capture, e-reader integration, academic-focused templates, and active recall tools. Feel free to jump around to whatever suits you.

At first-glance Roam is deceptively simple. Opening it for the first time and seeing a blank page with a date above it you might think, ‘what makes this different?’

This is partly because it takes a little time for it to click. Many share that it took a few weeks of playing around to really settle in, while for others, it might take just a single evening to show the potential of the platform and get you hooked.

But more than that, Roam is built with a different paradigm of thought in mind, it is built to be flexible and augmentable from the ground up. Don’t get me wrong, it has great out-of-the-box functionality, but mostly you can make it what you want. For the eager this includes add-ons, custom code, and integrations.

But I’m a big fan of starting simple and focusing on systems you actually use, rather than over-doing it from the start. Going heavy on systems (rather than focusing on actual use) kind of ruined some other feature-laden note taking apps for me. For this article, everything I show will focus on easy methods to get these systems that anyone can set up in minutes using Roam as-is.

Knowledge Capture

No matter your discipline — historian, social scientist, physicist, or studious project manager — you likely have an absurd backlog of scholarly journals, white papers, books, blogs, or even exciting tweet threads from peers that you just haven’t gotten around to reading yet. If you’re like me, you’re running into far more fascinating articles than you know what to do with, at times when you don’t have the opportunity to really dive into them.

Roam offers ways for you to capture those articles and books and save them into a reading list. This can be as simple as grabbing links and pasting them into a single page titled “reading list”, or you can use Roam’s tools for backlinking, tagging, and even integrations with apps like Instapaper or Readwise that can automate saving articles into Roam.

In this example I revisit a book in the ‘unfinished’ section of my reading list.

In the above gif, I show a very simple way to build a simple, functional reading list with a few statuses descriptors (finished, unfinished, reread) and a topics section. The header page (#toberead) is a home base where I create or get rid of status categories. Whenever I find an article or book I want to add to my reading list I throw it into my daily notes page and tag it with one of the #toberead tags. Then it automatically populates into #toberead for later review and retrieval.

In the gif I navigate to a page for Agustin Fuente’s book, “The Creative Spark” in my “unfinished” section. The entry for this book started as a simple #toberead tag in my daily notes 2 months ago and now it’s being filled with literature notes and highlights as I read from Kindle.

Importantly, this setup is flexible, letting you build up as needed:

• it can be named whatever you want #readinglist, #books/inbox and you can add as many categories & subcategories as are useful to you
• you can pair it with a #todayiread tag that functions as a reading journal for daily notes on the books you’re reading. these will automatically funnel into the main pages for those books
• Roam’s built in scheduling allows you to set future dates to read certain articles that you want to save for later, or schedule when to write deeper summarized notes from your quick notes or highlights

Having a knowledge capture stage is a crucial part in getting raw materials for your graph and ready to output as blogs, journal articles, essays and more. Thankfully, it doesn’t all have to be manual. There are a growing number of tools that make integration of notes and highlights from external sources easy to transfer into Roam.

Seamlessly Translate Highlights and Notes from e-readers to Roam

My Roam graph just blew up substantially the other day, and it took under 5 minutes and barely any effort on my part. This is because I took advantage of an automated integration between Readwise and Roam. Roam was already my main hub for taking notes on books and pdfs, but I found that I was focusing mostly on writing my own summaries and notes and less on capturing direct quotes.

Now, this isn’t a bad thing, but I was missing out on on the power of reviewing direct quotes from authors that spark ideas. After all, this is what highlights are for! But I want those highlights in a space where I can really use them.

One of the downsides of e-readers like the Kindle is that they aren’t as easy to flip around in as a physical book. This means that finding highlights and quotes later on can be tedious. This is where Readwise comes in. It automatically sync with your e-reader and extracts any highlights and notes and gives you useful options for reviewing them, including the ability to transfer your highlights into Roam.

The process is simple and the Readwise website can walk you through connecting your accounts and making the transfer. Here’s an example of an output page captured from Kindle:

Highlights from David Graebers superb book, Debt.

Now that I have these highlights in Roam, I can visit them at anytime, either directly or through exploring other ideas that these bullets connect to now. Thankfully, you can customize the output to match your style of note taking, making it easy to integrate your kindle highlights page for a book or article with any existing pages you already have. For the above example, I already had a page where I’d taken in-depth notes and summarized Chapter 1 of Debt by David Graeber. I integrated the Readwise highlights as a new section of that page, but I also could have left it as a separate Debt (Highlights) page.

But of course, collecting and tagging knowledge is just one level… we also need to digest and remember knowledge. If you look closely at the last two examples you’ll notice my pages for “The Creative Spark” and “Debt” have simple metadata with information on the author, year published, etc. at the top of the pages. As I’ll show next, Roam has easy tools for populating that information instantly through templates.

Simple Templates for Super-powered Note-Taking

The way Roam allows you to generate ‘systems’ is where Roam really begins to shows off its potential as a super-powered ‘second brain’. A lot of discussions on Roam around the web are related to the rising popularity of ideas like ‘building a second brain’ or books like Sönke Ahrens’ “How to Take Smart Notes”. There’s a growing awareness about the need for capturing deeper insights from what we read & learn rather than letting them fade.

Academics have long known the value of needing to effectively annotate their books or take useful notes as they regularly pour through entire bibliographies on different subjects. In basically every book I’ve read since age 12 I’ve written barely legible annotations up and down the pages and I’ve long searched for a way to translate these into a more accessible format. Roam offers powerful digital solutions for seamless note-taking, with the ability to easily generate templates for everything from daily routines and to-do lists, to annotated bibliography entries and metadata for books.

Book Metadata

The example here shows how to add basic metadata in an entry on a book or article you’re taking notes on. To follow this method, simply:

1. Create a page named [[templates]]. This will be your hub to create and edit templates.
2. To make a template, create a page or bullet point with the title of your template, such as bookmetadata and add #roam/template after the title. (Alternatively you can make templates anywhere, on any page, just tag it with #roam/templates and it will appear. I just find it handy to have them in a consolidated place)
3. Now create the design for your template as sub-bullets below the template title, as shown above. it can be as simple or complex as you like, and you can also create multiple versions in other bullet points on the page for this template (e.g. metadata1, metadata2…)
4. Whenever you start a page for a book or article, simply use double semicolons ;; and start typing the name of your template. you’ll automatically see the templates you’ve created pop-up in the search bar. Choose your desired template and click enter.

Using this tool it takes just seconds to recreate the template for note-taking on a book. You can make it even more useful by turning each metadata entry in your template into an “attribute” by adding a double colon to each item in your template (e.g. Author::). This allows you to click on ‘author’ or ‘abstract’ and you’ll see a list of every page where that attribute is used, another great tool to network your thoughts.

Annotated Bibliographies

Two annotated bibliographies and an example in use.

Another example that’s more specific for academic purposes are annotated bibliographies. These are incredibly useful short and powerful notes for digesting large amounts of literature. In the above snapshot I show two templates for annotated bibliographies, as well as a filled-in example that informed a book chapter I published in 2019. Annotated bibliographies are tools for reverse-engineering the thesis and main arguments of research literature, so they’re super focused and refined. Here’s a closer breakdown of one version I use:

• Citation: [write out the full citation for easy citing later]
• Perspective: [use this space to contextual what stance/perspective the author is taking]
• Opponents/Competing Perspectives: [do the opposite here, write out counter points that the author responded to and didn’t respond to, consider what other perspectives people take in this field]
• Question/Thesis: [here’s your chance to get at the central motivating question behind the research. try to infer what the author’s research questions were and write out the thesis in your own words. this will aid in summarizing/citing the article later]
• Argument: [now you can get into the heart of the argument, recreate the flow of logic and summarize the supporting evidence. the important thing is to be concise and focus on the most important overall points]
• Usefulness/Critical Comment: [this is a final meta-summary of how this article or book fits into your own research, and for sketching out your own perspective on the article]

What’s most useful about Roam is that templates like these are easy to make, find, and add to new pages, allowing you to focus on getting straight to the writing. This lack of friction makes Roam an incredible space to be productive in. Unlike classic digital note apps like OneNote or Evernote, every block or phrase can be easily and instantly transformed into a node connected to other blocks.

Practically this means there’s no stressing about where something belongs, because Roam makes it so easy to interconnect and rediscover the points of knowledge you’ve already created. Writing and growing your Roam graph becomes more than just note-taking, it becomes an active practice in thinking, in ‘networked thought.’ But going beyond just what you write down, it can also help you remember what you’re learning and thinking about with active recall.

Space Repetition aka Active Recall

We live in an era of unprecedented information overload, but find ourselves in need of tools for transforming information into understanding. ‘Spaced repetition’, also known as ‘active recall’ is a simple and powerful strategy for learning practiced by students and learners trying to digest large amounts of information and turn them into insight. It helps you naturally and easily lock in key facts, formulas or thesis points in practically any subject. Index & flashcards work on this same principle.

There are a variety of methods to recreate this science-backed learning strategy with Roam, that illustrate again how flexible Roam is. Here’s a one page example you can build in seconds.

An example text and tag based recall system

The goal here is to setup categories for how often you want to review something, starting first with short term recall practice and building to medium & long term recall. Here’s a step by step guide:

1. Start by creating an Active Recall page like the example shown above. Create pages for different “boxes” that you’ll use to capture knowledge youll want to practice recalling.
2. Anytime you’re taking notes on something you want to remember, create question statements reflecting the knowledge you want to recall, such as “What is terror management theory (TMT)?”. Tag it with your shortest term review tag (e.g. #AR-Box1 or any name you prefer). This will make it automatically appear in the page for that review box.
3. Next, in a sub-bullet point below the question write out in your own words a short but substantive explanation/answer to your question and hide the sub bullet so only the question appears.
4. Create a “review scheduler” on your active recall page, and make a todo list with “review #AR-Box1” and set the date to a few days in the future. Do the same with boxes 2–5 but at future dates that fit their respective review timing (for mine I set them up as daily, weekly, bimonthly, monthly and trimonthly reviews).
5. Whenever a review reminder pops into your daily notes, click into the review box and review the tagged active recall questions in that box; the goal is to answer the questions successfully without looking at the sub bullet points. This is also an opportunity to revisit the pages related to the subject you’re reviewing. Once you’ve answered a question successfully a few times, retag it to move it into a longer term box so you review it less frequently. Keep moving them out longer and longer until it’s locked into long term memory.

An example of Active Recall built into knowledge capture flow

This method works wonders for being able to fluently present or recall key details and complex topics. It’s built on the principles that (1) recall needs gradual attention to facilitate long-term memory, and that (2) understanding is built through contextualizing knowledge in your own words. You can take it even further by refining how you generate useful questions and capture deeper knowledge. This takes effort but you’ll find your clarity of thought on those subjects improves substantially over time. (Shoutout to Shu Omi for inspiring this setup).

Wrapping Up

If you search around you’ll find a lot of examples of how people set up their workspace in Roam. Keep experimenting. This is one of the things that brought me into Roam and the Roam community. It’s probably why you’re reading this now.

If you’re just beginning with Roam, I’d encourage you to consider starting slow and not adopting twenty different workspaces at once (unless you really are that eager). It helps to think over what you add and only build on what you really use. Don’t feel constrained by how others set things up. Most of what makes Roam so special is the gradual build up of systems that reflect and refine your thought and needs, not systems that force your thoughts and create false needs that aren’t truly necessary. I’d encourage you to find inspiration and then reverse engineer it.

The beauty of Roam is that the overall system is so flexible there are multiple ways to accomplish the same thing — so, go forward with whatever works best for you!

Have any special workflows you’ve worked on, or inspiration you’ve found? Did you find the examples I gave helpful, and did you improve on them? Comment below and let me know what’s worked for you and what hasn’t.

If you’re interested in learning more academic workflows for Roam, or just liked what you read, consider clapping for this article, sharing it with friends or giving me a follow. I’ll really appreciate it and it helps refine what content I’m working on.

Stay tuned for Part 2 where I’ll be thinking about workflows for building subject bibliographies, conducting a literature review with Roam, a special integration of Roam with Zotero that’s being actively developed right now, and more.

A group of academic and knowledge-focused professionals have created a community on Discord called Academia Roamana, come join us to nerd out on workflows, have a good time, and contribute to developer projects and workgroups focusing on academic subjects.

Disclaimer: I am not, nor have been affiliated with Roam Research, Readwise, or any other tool I mention. I simply see value in recommending them to others because I believe they can be immensely useful in people’s lives like they have been in mine.