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Connecting Zotero and Claude
Dear Reader, What did people in the late 17th century think when Thomas Savery used the first proto-steam engine to pump water out of a mine?
The so-called "Miner's Friend" resulted in a sharp divide between scientific enthusiasm and industrial rejection. While the scientific elite applauded the invention, the mining community largely dismissed it as dangerous and impractical.
Sounds familiar?
On a deeper level, it opened up a new class of devices not limited by muscle power, making it impossible to ever go back.
Something similar happened to me this week when I connected Claude CoWork to my Zotero library and was finally able to merge 100s of PDFs, notes, annotations, collections, etc. with my Claude setup.
Claude is connected to my note network, to my emails, to external services like Consensus, allowing it to understand me and search autonomously. I also have a growing library of skills for automating typical tasks related to question papers and academic writing (see the tutorial on skills). All that is now part of one system.
My observation is that science is moving into an idea domain, where an AI has a near-infinite capacity to act on your behalf, investigating remote, peripheral ideas.
Your job is to stay informed, focus on synthesis, and guide the ideation process.
Just linking Zotero and Claude will likely replace many of the tools and plugins we currently use to connect Zotero with Obsidian, search for and collect literature, etc.
And likely it will eventually replace reference managers completely.
Why catalogue PDFs at all if you can have access to them via a natural language interface and create any collection on the fly?
Don't miss out on implementing this workflow:
This workflow uses Zotero MCP, which creates a bridge between the local Zotero and Claude installations. The advantage is that you can work directly on the PDFs stored on the local installation, even adding and removing annotations. You need to set it up once, and can immediately plug it into your existing skills.
Last week, I announced my participation in the Thriving PI summit, and a few days ago, I finished recording my contribution. In the process, I tested the famous LLM Wiki that Andrej Karpathy (Cofounder of OpenAI) built and realised its fatal flaw for academics.
If you're curious to know why you shouldn't use his method in academia and what to do instead, join the talk.
* still 5 weeks away from officially being called "PhD" : )
The event is free and 100% online.
Please check out the information on speakers and topics on the website. Even if you're just interested in one or two talks, sign up, as it's free!
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.
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