Niklas Luhmann maintained two slip-boxes (How to Take Smart Notes page 18). Specifically one for brief bibliographical notes and one for his own thoughts. As I understand it, notes could link to entries in either box.
I see several narrow technical building blocks like tags, prefixing the node name with “Book:${NAME}” and such, or capture templates pointing to separate sub-directories. I also see the FAQ on “How do I have more than one Org-roam directory?”. I can imagine plausible tradeoffs (completion, linking, searching) among these building blocks.
However, I’m unsure what the standard conceptual pattern is for two slip boxes . In other words, should two slip boxes mean tags, org-roam directories, sub-directories, etc? I had imagined that “do the thing that Luhmann did” would be a common – if not default – pattern and feel like I am missing something obvious.
I think that he had three in total. In addition to the two mentioned by you, he had a topical index to guide his interaction with the slip box.
For each publication, I add a brief note to the slip box. Following my reading of Ahrens, I add my own thoughts and the insights gained from reading directly to the relevant topical note (with a reference to the publication).
Here an example (I am still on v1) that also shows how I use tags.
This is a great write-up and much more eloquently put together than my brief summary above. I also use Zotero to collect new sources, stick to one file for each note, and separate thinking about a topic from bibliographic notes. For fleeting notes, I use pen and paper (usually old envelopes from the mail). For me, every note always remains a draft. The only major difference is that due to the requirements in my field, I need to have more control in formatting my references (for example, sometimes with Chinese characters, sometimes without). Therefore bibtex and citations within Org are not really an option (I use Bookends).
