Be honest — where are your research notes right now? Word documents? A paper notebook? Emails to yourself with subject lines like “important thing I need to remember”? Sticky notes that have migrated to the bottom of your bag? If you answered “all of the above,” you are absolutely not alone, and this post is for you.

I recently ran a session for researchers at GCU on getting organised with OneNote, and the response to that opening question was very telling. Research generates so much material — reading notes, fieldwork observations, supervisor meeting actions, half-formed ideas at 11pm — and without a system, it all ends up scattered across multiple places and multiple formats. The result is that you spend more time hunting for things than actually thinking about them.

So let me walk you through what OneNote can do and how you might set it up for your research.

Understanding the OneNote Mental Model

The key to getting comfortable with OneNote is understanding its three-level structure. Think of it like this: a Notebookis your whole project or theme — so your PhD research, or a specific grant project. Within that notebook, you have Sections, which are like chapters or topic areas — your Literature Review, your Fieldwork Notes, your Supervisor Meetings. And within each section you have Pages, which are your individual notes — notes on a specific article, or a record of your meeting on 14th March.

Once this clicks, it becomes much easier to decide where things live. The key tip here: name your notebook after the project, not something vague like “Notes.” Future you will be grateful.

Building Your Research Notebook

Here’s a starting structure I’d recommend for most researchers:

  • Literature & Sources
  • Data / Fieldwork Notes
  • Supervisor Meetings
  • Ideas & Connections
  • Writing in Progress
  • Viva Prep

The Viva Prep section is one I always encourage people to add from day one. It seems early, but having a dedicated space to collect things that will be useful in your viva — questions your supervisor raises, gaps you identify in your reading, unexpected findings — means you’re not scrambling to reconstruct your thinking three years later.

You can rename, reorder and add sections at any time, so don’t let the perfect setup stop you from getting started. Adapt the structure to match how you already think about your research.

What Can OneNote Actually Capture?

This is where it gets genuinely useful. OneNote isn’t just a digital notebook — it’s more like a flexible research workspace. Here’s what you can bring in:

Typed and handwritten notes work on a free-form canvas, which means you can place content anywhere on the page. If you’re working on a tablet, it supports handwriting too.

You can insert PDFs and documents directly onto a page, which means you can annotate an article without ever leaving OneNote. No more PDFs lurking in Downloads that you vaguely remember reading.

The OneNote Web Clipper (a free browser extension for Chromen and Edge) lets you save webpages, articles and sources in one click, directly to the section of your choice. I’d encourage anyone who hasn’t tried this to clip one article this week — it tends to be one of those features that immediately becomes part of your workflow.

And if you prefer to dictate, OneNote supports audio recording and voice notes too.

Tags and Finding Your Notes

One of the features that doesn’t get enough credit is tagging. Tags let you mark content for action or retrieval and then pull all tagged items together in one view using Find Tags. There are some really useful built-in tags for researchers: To Do, Important, Question, Idea, Book to Read, Definition. You can also create your own.

This becomes especially useful when you’re in the middle of reading and you want to flag something to come back to — rather than hoping you’ll remember, tag it and find it later. Search works across all your notebooks with Ctrl + E (or Cmd + E on a Mac), and you can link between pages using page links, which is great for connecting ideas across different sections.

Sharing and Collaboration

Research is rarely completely solitary, and OneNote handles collaboration well. You can share your whole notebook with a supervisor or research partner so they can view and edit in real time. If you want to be a bit more selective — say you’d rather your supervisor only sees your meeting notes and not your half-finished ideas — you can share a single section instead by right-clicking the section tab.

If you’re part of a research group working in Microsoft Teams, you can create a shared notebook directly inside a Teams channel, which keeps everything in one place without extra setup.

Version history is also worth knowing about — you can view and restore previous versions of any page, which is a useful safety net when you’re collaborating or if you accidentally overwrite something.

OneNote in Your M365 Ecosystem

If your institution uses Microsoft 365 (and most UK universities do), OneNote is probably already available to you and it connects to a lot of the tools you’re already using. Your notebooks are stored on SharePoint or OneDrive, so they’re automatically backed up and accessible across all your devices. The mobile app means you can capture ideas, photos and voice notes on your phone and they appear instantly in your notebook.

You can take meeting notes directly from a Teams call, and if your institution has Microsoft Copilot, you can use it in OneNote to summarise pages and generate action items from your meeting notes.

A Few Things to Try This Week

If this has persuaded you to give OneNote a proper go, here’s where I’d start:

Set up your notebook using the structure above and name it after your project. Add your first real notes this week — don’t worry about transferring everything you already have, just start from where you are now. Install the OneNote Web Clipper and try it on one article. 

That’s it. Small steps, genuinely useful results.

If you want to explore further, my Getting Started with Note Taking post covers a range of note-taking systems including OneNote and Obsidian, so you can compare approaches and see what fits your working style. Watch Getting started with OneNote for beginners on YouTube.