Question: I have finished my M.Sc. in Applied Mathematics in 2016. I wish to pursue a PhD. Currently I am preparing for GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering, a master’s-level national entrance exam in India). In this respect, I have a few questions. 

1. If I only have a valid GATE score but no CSIR-JRF NET qualification, will I be eligible for the 25 k funding?
2. If yes to above, is this funding available for any NAAC-accredited university (public or private) in India?
3. Is there any written statement from the government which validates this?

Answer: 
In [this article](https://sites.udel.edu/victorp/files/2010/11/Psychological-Science-2014-Mueller-0956797614524581-1u0h0yu.pdf), "The Pen is Mightier than the Keyboard," the researchers tested this very issue. They found that taking notes with pen and paper is more effective... but, that was because students who typed their notes were copying lectures verbatim whereas students who took notes by hand were taking in the information and then writing it in their own words (thus processing the info at a deeper level).

So, the key is the way you process the information, not necessarily the method you use to take notes. But, at the same time, it is noteworthy (no pun intended) that longhand notes tends to lead to that deeper level of processing more so than does taking notes digitally.

Personally, I'm all about taking notes longhand, and I print out articles that are important to me/my work.
I used and still use pen and paper, although for my discipline, I bought engineering paper so that I put graphs on the left page and content on the right page. That is what I used for lectures and presentations. There are limitations on a digital format unless you turn it into a glorified writing pad. You cannot mark arrows easily, you cannot easily link text to graphs and you cannot write marginalia as easily, unless you are typing in LaTeX.

Outside of lecture, I use highlighters. Although I keep a digital copy of articles, you cannot markup a pdf from a publisher. I maintain four inch binders that are organized in a manner that is useful for me. I have my own Dewey system. Electronically, I store the articles using tags as names such as serial\_correlation\_explosive\_roots or mvue\_cauchy\_trimmed\_mean. I also depend a lot upon memory. The difficulty of using a markup system is that you do not know what will be important in three years.

When you read an article it may be that keywords a, b, and c were what was important to you, but the article contained a seemingly uninteresting reference to keyword d, which is not a keyword because you don't care at this point in time. The keywords do not hurt, but if they cause you to commit less to memory because you say "I can search it," then you actually have lost retrievable data. Of course in an ideal world you would have built a search using the contents of the pdfs.

Pre-built bibliographic tools exist. BibTex is very useful, though not ideal. For continuity I use BibTex though if I were starting today, I may not. I maintain a unified bibliography for everything I have ever used or done. BibTex is part of LaTeX. If you are going to do professional writing, you should probably learn LaTeX. Download something like MikTex and then use something like TexStudio as a wrapper so you do not have to type out all of the commands. It isn't bad to learn on MikTex, but it is slower than TexStudio since TexStudio will guess what you are trying to do and autocomplete.