I never learned about this until graduate school. We write what is called a précis of the book. It looks like this: Citation: self explanatory. Author information: quick background about where they went to school and their other works. No more than two or three sentences. Thesis: what is the point of the material Argument: how did they make their point Summary: I typically try to write one or two sentences per chapter here. If there are a lot of chapters I might break it down to writing a few sentences about the different sections if it’s divided into part 1, part 2, etc. Evaluation: write what you thought about the book. Was is useful? Did you like it? Would you recommend it to someone?

Your précis becomes your guide to the material you looked at. Once it’s written you don’t have to reread the material, you can use your précis to go back and find what was important about the material.

As for how to “gut” a book, speed reading becomes your best friend. I had to read two books per week for a single class my last semester and I was taking other classes. So you really have to learn how to speed read in graduate school. My technique is to read the introduction all the way through because that typically summarizes the book for you. When you’re lucky some authors tell you in the introduction “in chapter one I will argue this then in chapter two I will explain this etc.” Then I would typically read the first paragraph of a chapter, skim through the rest of the chapter, but always read the bold and look at any diagrams, graphs, or pictures because they are normally important. Then I would read the end of the chapter because they typically summarize the highlights of the chapter. Typically when going through the chapters I write a summary of each one, no more than 5 or 6 sentences that can be reduced when writing the summary portion of your précis. Finally I always read the conclusions of books. That’s typically where the authors reenforce and explain thesis. If you do this you can write a decently thorough précis. Also don’t forget someone else has probably read the books you are preparing to read. There are always plenty of reviews out there on the internet you can check out. If you have access to databases like jstor you can find some pretty good reviews to help you get through your material. Hopefully this helps. Good luck!

So my experience as a grad school student who was studying straight history and has now transitioned into a more media-studies-type role(with a heavy concentration on US History) is as follows: Historian's don't really meticulously read books unless they're specifically searching for certain pieces of information. Academic history books are usually structured such that the author's thesis and main supporting arguments are stated at the beginning and the end. Most of a 600+ page book is showing one's work, citing other sources, documenting topical minutiae and research methods. That is not to say that this is unimportant(as this sub's rigorous rules for documentation indicate, historians rightly value substantiated claims), merely that in an academic context, being able to prove your pedigree is of secondary interest to a surface level reader than one's main argument. There are other factors that have to do with learning strong research skills, but in my (reasonably) informed opinion that's basically what's going on there.

Without wanting to disagree with the other fine responses, I'd like to highlight the importance of dealing methodically with primary source information too. This is much more of a mixed bag - depending on your period, approach and archives you'll likely end up with a hodgepodge of digital and physical copies of things. It's vital that you store them logically (ideally preserving the archives' own system to allow for better referencing) but also allowing for searching. I was (un)lucky that several of my key archives didn't allow photos or made photocopying a pain - transcribing was hell at the time, but made ctrl-f my best friend later on. For digital images (I ended up with tens of thousands), renaming them as a series of keywords based on subject, author, contents etc also made finding material easier, and I regretted not doing this across all my collections. Lastly, get familiar with database software and don't be afraid to use it. I never realised how useful it was until I started writing a thesis chapter not covered by my main database...

In pulp studies, it usually depends on knowing what you're looking for and what's available. A lot of basic facts as far as publication dates of various stories are readily available online, or through databases or specialist indices, but the actual stories and issues might be much more difficult to source, given the self-destructive nature of the material—and fanzines and other contemporary periodicals tend to be scarce and expensive. There are published biographies and collections of letters and essays by various pulp fictioneers, editors, etc., the quality and utility of which varies. The most complete correspondence yet published is that of H. P. Lovecraft and his circle, which is at 20+ volumes and counting. For others, your best hope is that their letters and/or papers survive and have been deposited at a friendly library or archive—I myself have had to make several requests of Bowling Green's exceptional Popular Culture Library and the Wisconsin Historical Society's Derleth archive (August Derleth was co-founder and primary editor/publisher of Arkham House, and a prominent pulp writer, fictioneer, and poet in his own right).

But as far as the mass of journals, scholarly and not-so-scholarly go...you're kind of on your own, there's a few indices out there, but there's still a lot of voyage of discovery where you run across a citation to an article or letter buried in an old 'zine and have to track it down. I'm rather fortunate in that regard in that I've accumulated a fairly extensive library of reference and source materials over the years, and can cross-reference a lot of stuff on my own through carefully poring through half a dozen books over a few hours, but if I didn't have that I'd be down to making interlibrary loan requests and sending emails requesting scans of letters and old pulp 'zines and the like. Fortunately, most of the fellow travelers in pulp studies are gracious pack-rats who share some of their own materials, if you know who to ask.