A medical student in China spent four years curating a deck around People's Medical Publishing House Surgery (9th ed.), integrating supplementary lecture notes into 55 sub-mind-maps with 5,000+ cards. She shared the entire learning set publicly on the MarginNote Chinese community (4.2k reads, 30 likes, 2025-09-03). Independently, a Canadian physician describes a similar pattern in a verified App Store review. Below is the workflow distilled from both — with sources you can click through to verify.
30-second framing
Medical students with multi-year horizons (preclinical → Step 1 → residency). Reading large textbooks (Robbins, First Aid). Building a deck you'll keep maintaining for 3+ years, not cramming for one exam.
Less than 6 months until your test. This workflow has high upfront cost — 55 sub-maps don't appear overnight. If you're 4 weeks out from Step 1, use AnKing instead. This is for the long game.
Medical content sprawls. Pathology in Robbins, mechanism in BRS, surgery in Sabiston, drug in Goodman & Gilman — but on the wards, "myocardial infarction" is one thing. This workflow re-organizes textbook content around clinical reality, not chapter order.
First interaction · 5-step clickable walkthrough
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Second interaction · Try it in 10 minutes
7 steps from "open MarginNote" to "first scheduled review." Check off each step — progress saves locally, so you can pause and come back.
Source 1 of 2 · Public Chinese forum post
The detailed workflow above was inspired by a publicly shared learning set on the MarginNote Chinese community forum. The author writes in Chinese; the quote below is preserved in original Chinese with a literal English translation. Click through to read the full thread.
"我是熊字饼，一名医学生，目前复旦研一在读，使用 MarginNote 已有 4 年时间。以人卫《外科学》（第九版）为结构主体，整合 2024 外科学讲义等多个资料，共包含 5000+ 精心提炼的知识卡片，按书本章节拆分成 55 个子脑图。"
English (literal translation): "I'm Xiongzibing, a medical student currently in my first year of graduate school at Fudan University. I've used MarginNote for four years. Using People's Medical Publishing House Surgery (9th edition) as my structural anchor, I integrated 2024 lecture notes and other materials into 5,000+ carefully refined cards, organized into 55 sub-mind-maps following the textbook's chapters."
Source 2 of 2 · App Store verified review
An English-language physician describes a structurally similar workflow: textbook anchor + 4-year horizon + multi-source integration. Verbatim from App Store review with verifiable review_id.
"TLDR: I've spent thousands of hours and thousands of pages in this program. Amazing and worth every penny for any student/academic. Start slow, get familiar with the exceptionally well executed basics and then learn to use the more powerful features. Nothing else compares.
Throughout medical school and residency I was constantly looking for a program that let me upload electronic textbooks to highlight and annotate with easy referencing. I tried everything, Goodnotes, Onenote, Evernote — you name it I tried it, and while they all worked fine/ok for annotation and highlighting, they all struggled when it came to reviewing what I'd already gone over. Once I found MarginNote I was hooked."
280893313767LEKQwcqOb0XOzuW__JyTczA · retrieved via Appfigures API · MarginNote 3 (Mac)
Three plain reasons this works (not "the workflow has been experimentally validated" — just why "doing the organizing yourself" usually beats downloading someone else's deck):
1. Self-made cards tend to stick better than downloaded ones. Xiongzibing didn't download AnKing — she built every card from her textbook over 4 years. The act of writing each card is itself part of how it sticks. Anki's own creator SuperMemo's Wozniak wrote the same thing: how a card is written matters more than when you review it.
2. 55 chapter-sized maps because one mega-map is unworkable. A single mindmap of all of surgery would be unviewable. Chapter-sized chunks are easier to hold in view at once.
3. The same concept with multiple sources on one node holds context better. "Appendicitis" appearing with both textbook and lecture-note sources hanging off the same mind-map node — the two sources reinforce each other on retrieval.
For the broader framing — how MN fits around Anki specifically — see vs Anki.
Free 14-day trial. macOS / iPadOS / iOS. FSRS-native. Run the 7-step skeleton above and you'll know in 10 minutes if this rhythm is yours.