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The Effortless Academic

Integrate Zotero + Obsidian with this powerful workflow

Published about 2 months ago • 1 min read

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Connecting Zotero and Obsidian

Dear Scholar,

I am currently in the middle of the Note-Taking Mastermind where 20 academics like you are learning everything I know about Obsidian, AI and academic work. One of the topics everybody is excited about is the Zotero Obsidian integration, so I figured it would be of interest to most readers of the Effortless Academic.

The Obsidian-Zotero integration is a secret weapon for modern academics. It lets you link all your annotations and PDFs to your notes. Over time, we can build a network of knowledge that "thinks for us" and instantly sparks new research ideas. Moreover, finding your annotations and papers in Obsidian is very easy due to the AI integration.

The integration works using a plugin called Zotlit (covered in detail in the note-taking course). Zotlit can pull any data, including annotations, into Obsidian and uses a set of templates to specify how they are integrated. There are two general use cases: (1) Importing a literature note with all annotations, and (2) drag and dropping single annotations from Zotero into Obsidian. Zotlit allows you to create links, which directly open Zotero at the annotated location.

I have been writing a lot about Obsidian recently. I'm curious to know how many of you are actually using this wonderful note-taking tool?

Wishing you a wonderful weekend,

​
Ilya Shabanov, The Effortless Academic​

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