For uniformity, please maintain a project summary document in LaTeX on https://overleaf.com. Please ask me to send you a template that you can copy. Then send me a link for editing (you’ll have to enable link sharing). Overleaf should be available to all Purdue students for free upgrade to professional account (see https://www.overleaf.com/edu/purdue).
The basic structure of the project document should be:
- Executive summary (1 page) - First page should be executive summary of the project. A single page you could use to discuss the project with someone else (e.g., a collaborator or another student).
- Other results or core ideas - The second and further pages could be significant results or particularly useful notes that might go into a paper.
- Meeting agenda items, notes and action items - Here you would maintain any agenda items such as research questions or discussion points, a short summary of any meetings, and action item(s).
- Annotated bibliography - This would just help maintain a short description of any papers related to this project organized by subject.
For each paper, it is often useful to include the following in the short description (maybe even use short headers like “Key idea: … Relation to our work: …“).
- Key idea - What is the key idea/insight in the paper?
- Relation to our work - How does this work relate to this project?
- Distinguishers - How can we distinguish ourselves from this work? How are we different from this work?
This structure could be changed or modified. I’m not set on the structure but I think it would help to keep a summary in one place. Of course, you are free to take notes in other formats, this would just be a short summary that we can all look at and access throughout the project. This would be more clean and simple than your scratch notes since you are trying to summarize any key thoughts, ideas or insights. This will also help you practice some writing, which is essential for all projects and even for clarity of your own thought.