Template for taking notes for a paper? I will soon start my thesis, and have read a bit of literature, particularly a few short papers. One professor recommended using a template, displayed below. However, I generally feel that the questions in the template don't apply well to the papers I have read, and my answers get very "artificial" or "forced", while some aspects are not answered by the template at all. Obviously no template can fit perfectly for every paper, but perhaps there are better templates out there. 

Are there any standard templates for this purpose? Perhaps a list of questions to ask oneself when reading? Or other structured ways of note writing for scientific papers or similar literature?


  Title
  
  Title of paper
  
  Citation
  
  Authors
  
  Abstract
  
  A short summary of the paper.
  
  Issues
  
  What are the issues that the paper addresses? Describe the problem.
  
  Approach
  
  What did the authors do? How did they approach the problem. What did
  they do? What methods did they use?
  
  Conclusion
  
  What are the authors conclusion? What do they claim about their
  results.
  
  My Conclusion
  
  What do you think about the work presented in the article? Explain
  
  Rating
  
  Give a score [0 - 10] 0: awful, 10: brilliant.
It can't be any more minimalistic than that.

Basically you have some metadata: title, citation, abstract, comment (your conclusion) and rating.

That fits every intellectual work, you could apply it to movies, songs or anything that has an author and about which you can have an opinion.

Then there are a few other fields that cannot be any more minimal:


issues: why is the paper written and published? There has to be a reason for that work to have been done, presumably people don't enjoy wasting their time.
approach: which is basically what they do. There was a reason to do something (and then publish it) an "issue" and something has been done about that "issue" so that it is less of an issue in the future.
conclusion: there was an issue, something has been done, is it still an issue? are there more open issues?


Quite simple if you think about it.

Survey papers and so on basically solve the issue of summarizing something, they cite other papers, so you should also fill this template for those other papers.

Are you having trouble with some other kind of papers? This seems to capture everything that is relevant. Do you miss something?