Sponsor: Anara Anara uses AI to help researchers quickly understand dense materials, whether academic papers, books, or lecture recordings, while keeping everything organized and traceable. Learn more about Anara Get 20% off with code ILYA20 Tutorial: Styling Links with Obsidian Dear Scholar, The Academic Knowledge Management Webinar 2.0 just concluded with over 200 academics joining. During this and previous webinars, people repeatedly asked me one thing about my Obsidian vault: How do I...
11 days ago • 1 min read
Dear Scholar, I am currently conducting very data-intensive research that involves records from thousands of forest plots and measurements of millions of individual trees conducted over 50 years in New Zealand. A lot of data to analyze and find out how forests are changing. This massive data collection is aggregated from many sources, then cleaned, arranged, combined, filtered, recombined, processed, transformed, recleaned, and rearranged again. A very messy process that far surpasses the...
25 days ago • 2 min read
Dear Scholar, When doing innovative research, you need to do a lot of reading, looking for a tiny grain of insight or a gap that fits your research perfectly and allows you to identify new publishable insight. Most of what you read, though, is not strictly relevant. Looking for important, impactful questions can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. A new tool we are reviewing this week promises to help you find that needle using AI: Anara.com. Anara can combine insights from dozens...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Sponsor: Sourcely Sourcely is your AI-powered academic search assistant, offering access to over 200 million papers and advanced search filters. It streamlines research by finding credible sources, summarizing them, and exporting citations instantly—helping you save time and improve quality. Learn more about Sourcely Get 40% off with code Effortless40 (annual)or 20% off with Effortless20 (monthly) Dear Scholar, When I do a literature review, one of my biggest struggles is to keep papers...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Dear Scholar, This week, we are reviewing a different AI tool to help with academic writing. Instead of helping you to edit, WriteWise helps you start—and it does so by grounding its entire drafting system in the linguistic theories of John Swales. If you’ve ever taught students to identify the “research space” or structure an introduction using Swales’ CARS model, you understand what makes WriteWise different to ChatGPT or Paperpal. Writewise is designed to create first drafts, not finished...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Dear Scholar, Finding credible papers for an unfinished manuscript can make the difference between a good and an excellent paper, and it shouldn’t take longer than writing the paper. In this week's blog post, I tested Sourcely, an AI research assistant that matches academic sources directly to your text. Just paste in your draft, and it suggests peer-reviewed papers, highlights citation-worthy text, and summarizes them. You can export these citations, download the PDFs, and save everything in...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Dear Scholar, Literature Review AI tools are entering a new phase. So-called "AI agents" are language models that don't just answer a query, but instead come up with a series of steps, autonomously search the internet, analyze papers and after a few minutes deliver an exhaustive result answering your scientific question. During this process, the AI reads 100s or even 1000s of papers. Multiple tools can do this type of "deep" queries and all of them are mere months old: SciSpace Deep Review...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Dear Scholar, One of the most frequently asked questions folks asked me in my last webinar on academic writing was how to make ChatGPT sound like you, instead of the generic robotic text it often generates. Since we didn't have time to discuss details, I wrote an in-depth blog post and created a ChatGPT bot that sounds like Nathan Swenson, an ecologist I admire and read a lot. You can even put this to a test and have a conversation with my academic writing bot, which I updated for this...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Dear Scholar, This week, I would like to invite you to two events that might interest you and ask you what topics you are most curious about so that I can explore them next. Starting next week, the newsletter is going to give you a deep-dive every week on the topics you vote for: Which topics do you find most interesting? "Deep" AI models (e.g. DeepSeek, ChatGPT's Deep Research) for Lit review Organizing Notes in Obsidian Tool Comparisons: Reference Managers Tool Comparisons: Literature...
3 months ago • 2 min read
