Integrate Zotero + Obsidian with this powerful workflow


Paperpal.com (Sponsor)

Your AI-powered academic writing assistant from first idea to final draft. Use it to write, cite, take notes, and chat across multiple PDFs. Finished writing? Use Paperpal's AI language and plagiarism detection. Everything an academic needs, all in one place.

Discount Codes:
ILYA30 (30% off Paperpal Prime)

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

Don't want to receive emails like this: Unsubscribe from newsletter only .
Want to unsubscribe from all future emails?
Unsubscribe from everything.
Your
Preferences.

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

Jenni.AI for academic writing Dear Scholar, There are several tools available to support academic writing. This week, we tested Jenni.AI. Jenni is a unique tool because it combines multiple aspects from other tools: MS Word for writing, Zotero for references and ChatGPT for AI assistance. Moreover, Jenni can find references as you write and do some sanity checks on your writing. This article examines three use cases. (1) Writing the outline with Jenni.AI and the various ways how AI is...

Obsidian gets an AI agent Dear Scholar, While I absolutely love AI, I always found that the AI agents underwhelming. They were slow and made many mistakes. However, this week I was diving deep into the Google's Scribe plugin which enables the use of an AI agent within Obsidian. For the first time, I feel that the AI agent was truly useful because it either did something that I wouldn't be capable of or would be too lazy to do. Going forward, I think Gemini Scribe is a must-use plugin for...

Academic Writing with AI Dear Scholar, No topic is as hotly debated as whether and to what extent AI should be permitted in academic writing. Plagiarism is a significant issue, but so is the increasing number of papers being produced (and the implicit assumption that using AI produces papers faster and thus lowers their quality), which is overwhelming the peer-review system. And lastly, a more subtle notion of not fully understanding the science when outsourcing some of the writing, which is...