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# Emacs as a fully-fledged reference manager
Vidianos Giannitsis (he/him) - IRC: vidianos, <https://github.com/Vidianos-Giannitsis>. Vidianos Giannitsis on LinkedIn <mailto:vidianosgiannitsis@gmail.com>
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Even though all of my note-taking and literature organization
infrastructure has been in Emacs for a few years, I haven't been able to
make myself independent from a literature manager (Zotero in my case)
until recently. Zotero was just too convenient. You can capture articles
seamlessly (although downloading attachments didn't always work as
intended), organize them in directories and take a quick look at your
lists to determine what to read next, before you move on to actually
reading them and taking notes.
This year, I finally decided that I am tired of this and I will find a
way to do this fully in Emacs. This talk will be discussing my findings
in this regard. A lot of this was built in Ebib. It turns out that a lot
of what I considered useful for this workflow was already available
through this excellent software, built inside Emacs. Not everything
worked as I wanted on installation, but naturally, this is Emacs, so I
just hacked my way through getting the exact behaviour I wanted. This
required integration with other tools and especially a closer
interaction between Ebib and Org-roam. This came out incredible and I am
now very happy with using it, so I thought I should also showcase it in
EmacsConf!
With this integration ready, only capturing articles from the web
remains. Zotra can capture articles in a way about as seamless as
Zotero's (it actually uses Zotero's translators, but from Emacs).
Attachments remain a problem sometimes, but that's publishers making
attachments hard to get because third party software can't see that you
have full access to them, so I have decided to do those mostly manually,
I often did that with Zotero anyways.
Relevant links:
- [Zotra - Capturing Articles](https://github.com/mpedramfar/zotra)
- [Ebib - Organizing literature before and after reading](https://joostkremers.github.io/ebib/)
- [Org-Roam - The missing link to create an effective reading list](https://www.orgroam.com/)
- [Bibtex Completion - Useful tools for manipulating literature](https://github.com/tmalsburg/helm-bibtex)
About the speaker:
I'm Vidianos and I'm currently doing my PhD in KU Leuven in Belgium.
Working on research means I have a need for good tools to help me with
my research. I have been using Emacs for roughly 5 years now and I can
confidently say it is the number one tool that helps me with this
research. This talk will be all about how it helps me and about finally
being able to remove external reference managers from my workflow,
something I have wanted for years, but that I haven't managed to do
before this.
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