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...
14 days ago • 1 min read
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...
20 days ago • 2 min read
Can AI Detectors improve Academic Writing? Dear Scholar, Almost everyone I speak to is using AI for academic writing. Some more, some less. To balance AI writing with understanding, I have developed the atomic sentence method and thought hard about the ethical implications. But after a few AI-enhanced writing iterations, it is hard to keep track of how much AI you actually used. This is where AI detectors come in. These tools can help you gauge whether your writing relies too heavily on AI...
28 days ago • 1 min read
Capturing anything with Web Clipper + AI Dear Scholar, Capturing information from the web into Obsidian is easy for scientific papers by using Zotero or Paperpile. But for less "formal" content, such as essays, YouTube videos, or lecture notes, this does not work, even though much learning occurs through these platforms. This is where the Obsidian Web Clipper comes in. It is a browser extension that captures any website into your Obsidian vault using a template-based approach and AI...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Top Obsidian Plugins For an Organised Vault Dear Scholar, Happy New Year! I hope you had a good rest and are ready to start the new year with clarity and confidence. Over the holidays, I polished my academic and personal vaults in Obsidian. Interestingly, I found that they both can share the same system and configuration if set up correctly. Over the next few weeks, I will introduce you to aspects of this newest update to my note-taking and knowledge management system. (If you haven't used...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Updates to The 3 Core Tools For Literature Search Dear Scholar, If you have been following me for a while, you might have heard of the "AI search loop." Given a question, this method is a thorough yet rapid way to find relevant scientific literature. Today's newsletter covers recent updates to all involved tools. Most interestingly, Google Scholar is now becoming an alternative to pricy AI tools. (See below what it means for the big picture.) Here's how the search loop works: Based on a...
2 months ago • 3 min read
Dear Reader, Last week, I made a post on using AI for academic writing, which enraged the community like nothing I have ever written. 4 Million views & about 400 hate comments. A dozen people even took the time to reach out to the dean of my university & my supervisors (yet none to me personally). I don't think even 1% read past the hook ("I wrote 4000 words for my thesis with AI") and ignored that the basis for the entire process were my own papers, the workflow included deep-reading &...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Obsidian Bases for Idea Generation Dear Reader, Generating new ideas is the currency in academia: The more impactful your ideas, the more impactful your research, and the better your chances of success. But what are ideas? Ideas are connections between two related concepts. For instance, if someone finds a link between a vegetarian diet and hip fracture rates, that's novel and vital research that could improve people's lives. But these two concepts are not necessarily related. Nutritionists...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Sourcely.net (Sponsor) Your AI-powered academic search assistant, offering access to over 200 million papers. Sourcely finds papers matching an entire manuscript rather than a short query, providing scientific evidence for every sentence and enabling the so-called "reverse literature review": Write first, cite later. Discount Codes:Effortless40 (40% off annual)or Effortless20 (20% off monthly) Which Reference Manager To Choose For AI Dear Scholar, Reference Managers are the workhorses of...
3 months ago • 1 min read