How Do You Manage Slightly Different Info from Multiple Sources in Anki (Internal vs External Folder Setup)?

Anki Learning Effectively
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:memo: Post Body:

Hi all,

I’m a final-year med student using Anki daily. I rely on a mix of sources:

  • Past papers (most exam-relevant),
  • UpToDate, Toronto Notes 2024, textbooks/eBooks,
  • and LLMs (cross-checked).

Different references often give slightly different but valid information. For example, Ref A lists risk factors for Disease X as A-B-C-D, while Ref B lists C-D-E-F. All are correct, just framed differently.

To manage this, I’ve been experimenting with a two-folder Anki setup:

  • :brain: Internal folder – cards based on my own synthesis and reasoning
  • :books: External folder – cards directly quoting sources (e.g. “UTD says…”, “TN24 says…”)

It helps with clarity, but now I’m facing redundancy – I end up with multiple cards for the same idea, just from different angles. It’s harder to maintain and review efficiently.

My question:
:backhand_index_pointing_right: How do you reduce redundancy between internal and external Anki cards, while keeping both your own thinking and reference traceability?

Would love to hear:

  • How you structure or tag these two types of cards
  • Whether you integrate source notes into fields, tags, or separate apps
  • Whether you prioritise only internal synthesis and keep external refs elsewhere (e.g. Notion)

Any ideas or examples from fellow med students would be much appreciated!

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I have a field named Source which I use in about 10-15 % of my medicine related notes for content that might be hard to trace down later (this might be the case for some useful insight from specialised literature or content focussed on numbers, but certainly not general knowledge that can easily been researched again from different sources). The basic formatting is Author - Title Year - no journal names, no isbn, no doi, as this will slow me down. The add-on Field AutoComplete helps to reuse previously entered sources.

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