Template for taking notes for a paper?
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?