Obsidian Tutorial for Academic Writing

Author: Leonardo Castorina

Length: • 2 mins

Annotated by Florian

Practical writing Tips for Manuscript Writing, Posters, and exporting citations to Word, PDF, and Latex.

Obsidian is a powerful note-taking app that I use on a daily basis. In a previous article, I wrote about how to set up Obsidian for Productivity, specifically for scientific research:

How to Boost Your Productivity for Scientific Research Using Obsidian

Tools and workflows for managing your zettelkasten, projects, reading lists, notes, and inspiration during your PhD.

universvm.medium.com

Table of Contents

In this article, I will show you how to use Obsidian for Academic Writing. We will cover the following topics:

  1. Writing Notes from Papers
    — A. Connecting Zotero to Obsidian
    — B. Literature Notes Templates
    — C. Importing Highlights from Zotero
  2. Writing a Manuscript — A. Insert a Citation in Markdown
    — B. Copy MLA Citations to Text
    — C. LaTeX-like Figures and Section Referencing (NEW: Added Jan/2023)
  3. Exporting your Text (with citations)— A. Converting Links (Obsidian to Markdown notation)
    — B. Exporting to PDF, Word, LaTeX
  4. Creating Academic Documents (NEW: Added Dec/2022)
    — A. Academic PDF (.pdf) / LaTeX (.tex) Export with Plugin (NEW: Added Jun/2023)
    — B. PDF (.pdf) Export with CSS
    — C. Bibliography (.bib) Export with Pandoc
    — D. PDF (.pdf) Export with Custom Pandoc Template (LEGACY)
    — E. LaTeX (.tex) Export with Custom Pandoc Template (LEGACY)
  5. Batch Edit & Update Notes (NEW: Added Dec/2023)
     — 5A. Installing Obsidian Metadata and Backing up Vault
    — 5B. Moving Metadata into Frontmatter

Quick Links

These are some quick links and shortcuts in case you need fast access