Students
Beginner
16 min
Research and notes — reading less and understanding more
The problem
You have thirty tabs and a PDF that is 70% yellow. You cannot find anything and you remember almost none of it. Two weeks before the exam you open the notes and discover they are a transcript of the source, which means you have to read everything again.
The workflow
1State your question
2Find candidates
3Triage on abstracts
4Read the survivors
5Write notes in your words
6List your gaps
7Verify every citation
★Revise from the gaps
What you need
Question: How does working capital management affect profitability in Indian SMEs? Level: MCom first year.
The tool
Perplexity, or browsing-enabled assistants
The prompt
Subscribers. The full prompt is part of the SMEMinds AI Playbook. See plans.
What comes back
SOURCE 1 — Directly answers your question, Indian SME sample. Unique contribution: it is the only one here using Indian data.
Verify before you use it
Human review required. Check every line below before this leaves your screen.
- The 'what is missing' point is the most useful output — it reframed the question from whether to how, which changes the whole essay.
- Open and verify every source yourself. The triage is based only on abstracts you pasted, which is correct, but you still have to read them.
- Check that your notes are genuinely in your words. Copied sentences produce no encoding.
- Never cite a source you have not opened, regardless of how confidently it was recommended.