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# Writing academic papers in Org-Roam
Vincent Conus (he/him) - Pronunciation: vɪnsᵊnt koʊnᵊs, IRC: sunoc, Mastodon: @sunoc@social.linux.pizza, <mailto:vincent.conus@pm.me>

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Org-mode and more so org-roam are making for a fantastic note-taking system
inside Emacs. Combining the note-taking of org-mode, the capability to export
a note to LaTeX and PDF directly, the spectacular org-roam-bibtex package
and the flexibility of the elisp configuration of Emacs, it become possible
to use a org-roam note as the main document for write academic papers, even
when exotic templates are provided.

In this presentation, I want to talk about the way I am using org-roam to write
LaTeX documents, the benefits of it but also the various pitfalls and
difficulties encountered in this journey.

The key benefits being:

-   The integration with other org-roam notes.
-   Bibliography integration and links directly to PDF.
-   Org-mode literate programming capabilities.
-   Direct export to PDF.

The main challenges are:

-   Dealing with strangely formatted LaTeX templates.
-   Related, having to use other LaTeX compilers.
-   These two points can make citation of references, in particular, challenging.

About the speaker:

A PhD student in robotics at
Nanzan University, Japan. I have been using Linux for around 10 years at that
point, eventually moving many of my work and personal stuff to Emacs over the
years, including academic writing.

See also:

[[!taglink CategoryOrgMode]]
[[!taglink CategoryRoam]]

# Discussion

## Questions and answers

-   Q: I'd be interested how to start this journey of writing academic papers in Org-Roam when not having used  Emacs Org-Mode yet? Thanks!
    -   A:
-   Q: How about connecting Emacs Org-Roam to Zotero? Is that something you have experience with?
    -   A: You could export your bibliography from Zotero to bibtex.
    -   Tip: check out the Better Bibtex plugin and its handly \"Keep
        updated\" option - I do this selecting biblio.bib file in roam
        folder as target
-   Q: Out of curiosity, how do you manage your bibliography? Do you do it from inside Emacs, or using a separate program like Zotero?
    Because personally, I have struggled to do it from Emacs, although I
    have wanted to for sometime. I see, then I am just lazy and don\'t
    want to do it by hand -\_-
    -   A:
-   Q: How do you start a new document? There are a lot of headers you
    have to setup! Do you use a template? I\'m curious if they use
    yasnippets to deal with all of those latex/org meta commands? (IRC:
    gringo)
    -   A: At present, not using snippets (but considering).  Currently
        re-uses previous doc as template.  There\'s reconciling template
        received from the journal/publisher.
-   Q: What do you think of using citar with org-roam-bibtex? It seems
    that bibtex-completion is tied to org-roam-bibtex.
    -   A: Has not explored citar. I am pretty sure org-roam-bibtex
        works with citar.
-   Q: Most academic journals insist that papers are formatted in their
    own custom LaTeX documentclass.  Does org-roam make it easy to do
    that? (jmd)
    -   A: No.  Makes a custom org latex class, to the import the cls;
        then putting the template provided in the headers of the
        document, or as needed in the body block.  Then there\'s manual
        adaption.  When using LaTeX, you care much about the output of
        the document; each domain/field of research has its own flavour
        of expectations.
-   Q: Are you using zotra
    ([https://github.com/mpedramfar/zotra](https://github.com/mpedramfar/zotra))
    or org-ref ?
-   Q: How much of this is tied to org-roam specifically?
    -   Not that much
-   Q: how do you convince your coauthors to use emacs?

## Notes

-   Presentation org notes formatted for org-present:
    [https://gitlab.com/sunoc/emacsconf-2024-presentation](https://gitlab.com/sunoc/emacsconf-2024-presentation)
-   Thank you for this! I am using org to export my CV, and had to
    figure out a few of these things. Lots of new bits for me to
    explore.
-   Thanks, good presentation.
-   Those exports look awesome
-   I wonder how much LaTeX experience is wrapped up in that export
    process
-   The problem-solving aspect of tinkering with Emacs is a boon.
-   The reference management that Vincent demo\'d comes from org
    integration. You wouldn\'t have that functionality with bare
    LaTeX/Typst, etc. 
-   Org to typst converstion:
    [https://github.com/jmpunkt/ox-typst](https://github.com/jmpunkt/ox-typst)
-   One way I\'ve seen to go about headers is having a template file:
    [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qHloGTT8XE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qHloGTT8XE)
    That you can import with a \"#+SETUPFILE:\" line
-   Maybe down the line we can make ties with LLMs to translate styles
    better.


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