profile

The Effortless Academic

Best Zotero Plugins for 2026 • New EA Website

Published 1 day ago • 1 min read

Best Zotero Plugins for 2026

Dear Reader,

Today's newsletter is dedicated to Zotero Plugins. Most academics have heard of Zotero or are using it actively.

It's free and connects to almost any service out there.

I personally use it more as a bridge to import/export papers.

But if you have a large collection of Zotero papers, you can benefit a lot from its myriad of plugins for AI integration, automation, improved notes and many more.

The top Plugins are: ZotMoov, Beaver, Notero, Better Notes, Actions and Tags, Linter, and Better BibTeX, as well as 4 more niche ones.

A New Website for EffortlessAcademic

Some of you who are in the community have already heard that EffortlessAcademic is getting a new website. If you are curious about how it looks, check it out and let me know what you think!

What do you think of the redesign? Hit reply and let me know. Any feedback is greatly appreciated and personally read!

Thanks for being part of EA!

Wishing you a wonderful weekend,

Ilya Shabanov, The Effortless Academic​

The Effortless Academic is a community, newsletter and learning place for the modern academic, where you can learn to leverage academic tools, digital note-taking strategies and AI for a stress-free, successful career.
​
If you're ready to dive in, start with the foundation of Digital Note Taking to remember and synthesise ideas, the AI Lit Review Course to learn about recent (AI) tools for finding, reading and skimming relevant academic papers, or the AI writing and publishing courses to effectively publish your ideas.

Want to unsubscribe from all future emails? Unsubscribe from everything.

The Effortless Academic

Literature Review Tools, Note-Taking Strategies and AI tutorials for the modern academic. Publish more with less effort and supercharge your career.

Read more from The Effortless Academic

Using Kindle/eBook highlights in Obsidian Dear Reader, Do you use e-books rather than PDFs in your academic or personal work? I do, and if I don't take notes, the memory of books lasts only about 6 months. That's a waste! A better way I developed over the last couple of years, is to import the book highlights into Obsidian. But stored highlights are just information. To go from information → knowledge, you need to connect the passages from the book with your own thinking. To help with this, I...

15 days ago • 2 min read

My First YouTube Video: PhD Story & System Dear Reader,Last week I recorded, animated and edited my first real YouTube video, which sums up everything you need to know to start using Obsidian efficiently for your research. Part 1: Obsidian for Academics in 15 minutes Part 2: Organising Ideas using the Source Topic Argument System Part 3: A live demo of how it works, which was the highlight of the last information management course. Despite my best efforts, it turned out to be 55 minutes long!...

23 days ago • 1 min read

Connecting Zotero and Claude Dear Reader,After talking to many of my colleagues, I realised that for most academics, AI is near synonymous with using ChatGPT in the browser. But in the last 6-12 months (since Claude Code and Codex were released), things have dramatically changed, to the point where I feel that using ChatGPT wouldn't even cover 10% of what I do with AI today (See the second block in this email, if you're intrigued). This all started a few months ago, when the co-founder of...

29 days ago • 4 min read