Obsidian Zotero Integration Plugin Comparison

[nottakumasato]

Things I have tried

• Citation: GitHub - hans/obsidian-citation-plugin: Obsidian plugin which integrates your academic reference manager with the Obsidian editor. Search your references from within Obsidian and automatically create and reference literature notes for papers and books.
• Bibnotes: GitHub - stefanopagliari/bibnotes
• Zotero Integration: GitHub - mgmeyers/obsidian-zotero-integration: Insert and import citations, bibliographies, notes, and PDF annotations from Zotero into Obsidian.

What I’m trying to do

I am trying to decide which plugin to use to manage my notes/highlights and sources from Zotero. Those who have trialed these tools, which one was the best and why?

Note: Also please let me know if there is a plugin that I missed.

[nottakumasato]

Here is a list of downsides that I could find for each:

• Citations
  • Doesn’t import area highlights
  • Link in highlights don’t have a link to Zotero
  • Doesn’t import any highlights if Better CSL JSON export is used
• BibNotes
  • Updated annotations in Zotero don’t get updated in Obsidian (have to remove and reimport)
• Zotero Integration
  • Doesn’t import area highlights

[heumed]

Tried all three; settled on Bibnotes for the reasons you mention.

I’ve been using Bibnotes for the past month and it’s been rock solid and a joy to use. It has become one of two plugins, along with excalidraw, that are indispensable to my obsidian workflow.

My only concern is that, unlike excalidraw, it is unclear to me how committed the author is to continued development of the plug-in. I would feel much better if he would proceed with a release that is accessible through the community plug-in list rather than brat, and accept donations (like excalidraw’s dev ko-fi page) so that development is sustainable.

Edit: tagging @stpag should be like to comment

[stpag]

Hi @heumed. I’m using Obsidian and my plugin in my every day job, so I intend to continue working on it. But the time I have to work on this is scarce, and I’ve not been able to find time for this with the beginning of the academic year. So I’m not in a position to address all the bugs and feature requests that come.

Regarding the release in the community plugin, I will do it once I figure out how to

[akbarato]

What do you mean by “doesn’t import area highlights”? You mean visual block of information when you highlight the diagram in the PDF.

I tried using Zotero Integration but Tesseract shows error all the time, I don’t know.

[akbarato]

Does it still work now? Better BibNotes through BRAT?

I tried. It says

[dae]

There’s also a lightweight helper plugin for Zotero if you want to be able to see which Zotero items you’ve made Obsidian notes for, and jump to your notes from within Zotero.

GitHub - daeh/zotero-markdb-connect: Zotero plugin that links your Markdown...

[tophee]

@nottakumasato

Zotero Integration

• Doesn’t import area highlights

I believe this is a limitation in Zotero, but I think it can be fixed (haven’t had a time to dig more into this but this forum discussion is a good starting point for understanding how those images are handled in Zotero:

Export of images in annotations is not yet available, right?

[zanodor]

If you use the native Zotero reader for annotations (I am on the iPad) and make a note of your annotations on PC, use the Zotero Integrations plugin with Import #1 (and the template), the pics will be extracted.

I have set up Tesseract on my PC but I think I am missing the templater or Nunjucks expertise to see the result (if the OCR had been done at all) in my markdown file.
The majority of the pics taken will be graphics/images, granted.

[medium_old]

This is a gamechanger! Thanks for linking.