Comprehensive Academic Workflow from Reading to Writing in Markdown

So after some discussion with @argentum, I wrote a longer write-up of the academic workflow from reading to writing. The post is about the same things that the regularly mentioned Zotero-MDNotes-Obsidian Guide deals with.

However, my write-up is not really a step-by-step instruction, but more of a discussion how to accomplish and automate specific tasks. After a slightly “theoretical” discussion in the first half, the second half features an overview of dozens of tools for those tasks.

Since it is too long for the character limit of a forum post, I can only share a link to my website and the ToC here :slight_smile:

:arrow_right: Comprehensive Academic Workflow from Reading to Writing in Markdown

The Academic Workflow from Reading to Writing

  • The generalized version
  • The simple Word-Zotero version
  • The Zotero-ZotFile-BetterBibTeX-MDNotes-Obsidian-Pandoc version
  • Decomposing the workflow into its subtasks

Overview: Tools for the individual Subtasks

  1. Organizing References
  2. Saving References
  3. Linking PDFs, Reference Entries, and Citations
  4. Extracting Annotations/Notes From PDFs
  5. Citation Picker for Automatic Citations
  6. Bibliography Creation
  7. Compiling Markdown with Citations

(PS: Yes, it’s on Notion, after switching from Notion to Obsidian a while back, I didn’t have the time to also move my website yet. :sweat_smile:)

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@pseudometa Thank you! Very informative and helpful.

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Great and helpful post! One addition for section 5 - there is a Windows equivalent for Zotpick: GitHub - boan-anbo/Zotero-Citation-Picker-for-Windows: An AHK-based application to search and pick Zotero citations on Windows.

thanks! added it to the list

I just wanted to thank you for this. I found it after I asked a question about YouTubers that show end to end workflows for academics on Reddit and was given a variety of answers, that were useful but not quite what I was after. Your comprehensive workflow is exactly what I was after.

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