The other day, I wrote about Michael Behr’s scientific writing workflow that is centered around Zotero, Emacs, and Org mode. Here’s another example of a Zotero workflow, this time from Nick Judd.
Like Behr, Judd collects and manages reference papers with Zotero. Unlike Behr, he prefers to write his own papers in Markdown and use Pandoc to export the result to a PDF through \(\LaTeX\) rather than use Org mode. He doesn’t explain his choice—he doesn’t even mention Org—but his workflow seems to work well for him and, of course, Markdown/Pandoc is a more universal solution than Org mode.
If Markdown makes more sense for you, be sure to take a look Judd’s post to see how he ties everything together. He has detailed directions for getting everything installed and configured. Like Behr, he uses the Emacs package Zotxt to interact with Zotero from within Emacs. And if you haven’t seen Muad Abd El Hay’s comment to my Behr post, take a look at that too. Hay describes a slightly different Zotero workflow that uses John Kitchin’s org-ref package to handle the citations. It looks like an excellent solution.