DIY Software for Knowledge Management and SCI Paper Writing

The author has used many writing tools, but each tool has its own shortcomings. Therefore, the author had the idea of DIYing a workstation, but due to personal limitations (the author is not a professional programming developer), this dream has been unfulfilled for a long time. Until the emergence of Obsidian, which finally helped the author realize this dream.

Even if you don’t know programming, you can design your homepage, interface, and functions to create a DIY workbench suitable for learning, work, and research.

Obsidian has the following features that can help you build your own workstation.

✅Obsidian has a rich set of plugins that can be selectively installed to meet various purposes; whatever other tools can do, Obsidian can basically achieve.

✅Obsidian can establish projects and manage them, making it very suitable for learning and research.

✅Obsidian can export different article formats to meet the publishing needs of various platforms, such as Zhihu, WeChat official accounts, academic journals, etc.

✅MD files are also quite common, and many tools support MD, with results comparable to LaTeX and Word.

✅Obsidian can manage your notes, build network maps, and has very useful bidirectional links.

✅Obsidian allows you to write articles in a modular fashion, which is a very powerful feature.

✅Obsidian is free, except for the sync feature.

✅Obsidian supports free writing; the more notes you have, the more powerful your library becomes.

In summary, the above features make Obsidian very “hands-on” for users, but it can help you build your own workbench.

DIY from these aspects

Obsidian supports custom CSS files, allowing for custom themes.The author did not spend too much time on CSS but tried to utilize various plugins and community themes as much as possible. The overall effect is not glamorous but is entirely the result of the author’s gradual accumulation while learning to use Obsidian.

For friends who are not familiar with CSS, you can directly use mature themes.Obsidian offers a wide variety of community themes that can achieve different visual effects.

Plugins and CSS can meet DIY needs; here are a few examples:

👉🏻1. Toolbar, mainly the core plugins provided by Obsidian and the functional buttons of third-party plugins installed by the user. Plugins like 【customizable sidebar】, 【hider】 can be used to customize the display and hiding of buttons on this sidebar toolbar and modify button icons. Some command panel functions can also be added to this toolbar.

👉🏻2. File List, mainly displays the note files under the library folder. The 【recent files】 plugin can be used to show recently opened notes, making it convenient to find notes that were just used.

👉🏻3. Function Development, develop some workflows to extend the functionality of Obsidian. Plugins like 【buttons】 and 【quickadd】 can realize user-defined functionalities.

👉🏻4. Custom Homepage, similar to a browser homepage, it opens the homepage every time you start. Plugins like 【homepage】, 【templater】, 【workspaces】 can achieve the effect of a custom homepage.

There are many more plugins available; I won’t list them one by one here.

Next, the author shares some DIY examples of Obsidian from netizens.

A college student’s workbench

This netizen, as an undergraduate student, regards Obsidian as their knowledge management center, mainly used for the following purposes:

✔ Reading Notes

Notes made during in-depth reading of books are mostly recorded here.

At the same time, during thematic reading, different books can be linked through bidirectional links.

✔ Knowledge Cards

Techniques learned from the ZK card method, each card has tags, original text, references, and personal annotations.

✔ Knowledge System

Plans to categorize using the Chinese Library Classification method while linking different disciplines within the same field using bidirectional notes. (The theme used is the community’s Obsidian nord)

The workbench effect of this undergraduate student is shown in the following image.

Using dataview to display recently read papers, as shown in the following image.

A graduate student’s workbench

This graduate student believes that time is precious and does not want to complicate simple things. He does not have a habit of keeping a diary and is accustomed to using Todoist for schedule management. Therefore, for him, Obsidian is a safe, practical, and efficient bidirectional knowledge base software. He did not use the diary and dataview functions in Obsidian, which is a pity as these two features are very powerful.

However, as a graduate student, he connected Zotero and Obsidian through Citations & Mdnotes, making research smooth and perfect with 【local + bidirectional + Zotero + Obsidian + PDF-XChange Editor Plus】. For more on the integration of Zotero and Obsidian, please see the post: Love it, the literature management Zotero built-in PDF reader opens a new way to read and take notes, and can link with Obsidian.

The following image shows the effect designed by this graduate student when reviewing literature.

A netizen’s workbench

This is a workbench designed by a netizen, arranged for a specific task.

A: File area, open your files;

B: Recent file browsing area (a third-party plugin, Recent file);

C: Preview area;

D: Local relationship graph area:

E: Editing area;

F: Time planning area: Calendar plugin and Day Planners plugin.

In conclusion

The following image shows the author’s workbench; the first thing every day is to open Obsidian, check today’s todos, and then use Obsidian to write papers, take notes, and summarize the day’s work, planning for the future. Using the DIY tool gives a great sense of accomplishment!

If you also want to DIY your own workbench, then choose Obsidian.More powerful example libraries and templates will be shared in the future, stay tuned.

Obsidian requires users to configure it themselves, which may not be friendly for some users unfamiliar with programming and may deter some users initially. Once you successfully get started with Obsidian, you will feel its power. Obsidian can be used for learning, note-taking, research papers, and scheduling; these topics will be introduced in detail later.

If anyone wants to learn more about Obsidian, you can follow 投必得学术, like this article, or leave a message for us. The author will share more uses of Obsidian to help everyone better read, write, and learn using Obsidian.

Summary of Third-Party Plugins for Obsidian + Zotero

The power of Obsidian lies in its third-party plugins. So far, the author has summarized some research work and study methods combining Obsidian + Zotero with third-party plugins:

•【Obsidian】+【Media Extended & Extended BiliBili Plugin】is a great video learning tool that allows you to take notes while watching videos and even use video timestamps in your notes.

•【Obsidian】+【PDF to Markdown Plugin】is a handy PDF conversion tool that can directly convert PDFs into markdown files, allowing you to take notes directly on the original text.

•【Obsidian】+【Note Refactor Plugin】is a great tool for breaking down books, allowing you to deconstruct a book in various ways and build your own knowledge network.

•【Obsidian】+【Template Plugin】is a great quick writing tool that allows you to write papers and literature notes using different templates, improving your writing efficiency.

•【Obsidian】+【Day Planners Plugin】is a great time management tool that helps you plan your time with a visually appealing daily checklist and reminds you of your current and next tasks.

•【Obsidian】+【Mindmap Plugin】is a great tool for automatically generating mind maps, which can directly convert your text into mind maps, making lengthy texts clear and visual.

•【Obsidian】+【Enhancing Mindmap Plugin】is a free mind map drawing tool that allows you to draw your ideas directly.

•【Obsidian】+【Outline & Zoom Plugin】is a useful outline note tool that allows you to design paper outlines and brainstorm directly.

•【Obsidian】+【QuickAdd】is a useful flash note capturing tool that allows you to quickly record your ideas.

•【Obsidian】+【Mark Download – Markdown Web Clipper Plugin】is a useful web clipping tool that allows you to quickly import the web pages you want to save into Obsidian notes.

•【Obsidian】+【Zotero】is a powerful combination for literature management, reading, and note-taking, allowing for efficient switching between reading notes.

•【Obsidian】+【Cubox】is a powerful information fragment collection tool that allows you to save information from web pages and mobile phones into notes.

•【Obsidian】+【RSS Plugin】is a useful journal paper subscription tool that allows you to receive the latest journal papers daily.

•【Obsidian】+【Citations, Better BibTeX】is a way to link Zotero with Obsidian, allowing you to pick up all literature data from Zotero and import it into Obsidian, a good helper for writing notes.

•【Obsidian】+【cMenu】is a useful Word-like toolbar that allows you to edit text (titles, bold, superscript, highlight, etc.) as if you were using Word.

•【Obsidian】+【Editor Syntax Highlight】is an efficient programming note tool that allows you to insert highlighted programming scripts into your notes, which is very nice.

•【Obsidian】+【Markdown Formatting Assistant】is an essential formatting assistant tool that allows you to edit text, tables, HTML, mathematical formulas, etc.

•【Obsidian】+【MarkDownload – Markdown Web Clipper】is a web clipping tool that allows you to convert web pages to Markdown and paste or import them into Obsidian.

•【Zotero】+【Mdnotes Plugin】is a PDF annotation export tool that allows you to export literature notes to Obsidian, providing not only the literature’s metadata but also notes.

•【Obsidian】+【floating-toc】is a floating outline list tool that can add an outline to your text, which will display when the mouse hovers and automatically hide.

•【Obsidian】+【Table of Contents】is a directory tool that can generate a linked directory for your paper.

The above plugins are just the tip of the iceberg for Obsidian. The author will share more powerful uses of Obsidian’s third-party plugins in future posts, which can definitely enhance your research and learning efficiency.

Research Series on Obsidian + Zotero Integration

👉Episode 1: Efficient Reading and Writing, the Research Artifact Sweeping the Research Circle (Download attached at the end)

👉Episode 2: Research Note Artifact: Taking Notes While Watching Videos on Bilibili (Download attached)

👉Episode 3: Research Note Artifact: Convert PDF Literature into Editable Text in Minutes, Extract Knowledge Points, and Create Your Own Notes (Download attached)

👉Episode 4: Research Note Artifact: Book Deconstruction Artifact, Establish a Knowledge Map in One Minute (Download attached)

👉Episode 5: Research Note Artifact: Template Plugin Helps You Manage Literature Reading Notes and SCI Writing

👉Episode 6: Research Note Artifact: A Visually Appealing Research Schedule Checklist + Timeline Helps You Overcome Procrastination (Download attached)

👉Episode 7: Research Note Artifact: New SCI Writing Template, Covering All Paper Sections, Reusable, and Expandable!

👉Episode 8: Research Note Artifact: Automatically Generated and Free Mind Map Plugin, Essential for Researchers! (Download attached)

👉Episode 9: Measure Research Learning Efficiency with Three Notes Daily, Detailed Installation Tutorial for OB, Attached Plugin Package!

👉Episode 10: Love it, Literature Management Zotero’s Built-in PDF Reader Opens a New Way to Read and Take Notes, Can Link with Obsidian, Attached Download (1)

👉Episode 11: One-stop Information Collection Tool, Dream Integration with OB Notes, Quickly Build Research, Learning, and Writing Knowledge Base!

👉Episode 12: PDF Reader Now Equipped with Google Translate Functionality, Maximizing Efficiency

👉Episode 13: Literature Management Zotero Picks Up Literature Data, High Efficiency in Writing Literature Reviews, Can Link with OB

👉Episode 14: Notion, Logseq, Obsidian + Zotero for Paper Writing, Time-saving and Effort-saving Artifact!

👉Episode 15: EndNote, Mendeley, Zotero: How to Choose? Easily Switch, Quickly Export PDF Annotations and Highlights to Notes? (Download attached)

👉Episode 16: How to Subscribe to the Latest SCI Papers for Free and Receive Daily Paper Updates

👉Episode 17: Zotero Efficiency Plugin, Achieving Multiple Functions for Literature Citation, Bibliography, Notes, etc., Attached Download!

👉Episode 18: When Writing Papers, You Need to Master These Browser Plugins, Mathematical Formula Editors, Outline Lists, Syntax Highlighting Tools, and Programming!

👉Episode 19: Amazing! How to Capture Ideas Anytime, Anywhere While Doing Research and Writing Papers? (With Video Demonstration)

👉Episode 20: Other Translation Tools Are Really Weak! Youdao Academic Has Arrived, and the Translation Dictionary Can Actually Search and Download Papers!

👉Episode 21: Generate Dynamic Interactive Charts Based on Table Data Without Excel, Improving Research Productivity!

More Research InsightsClick👇, enter keywordsto search🔍

Today’s Video Recommendation

Urgent! Scholarship Evaluation

SCI Paper Inclusion Number

What to do if you don’t know how to check?

Arranged!

Click the video to learn!

↑↑↑ Follow “投必得学术” video account for more insights ↑↑↑

Summary of Third-Party Plugins for Obsidian + Zotero

Research Series on Obsidian + Zotero Integration

Related posts

Leave a Comment Cancel reply