Jonathan Bennett has another post up in his Year of Emacs series. This one is about writing academic papers. Bennett is in the humanities but still uses Emacs and Org-mode to write his papers. I’m always interested in posts like this because writers in the humanities have special conventions they need to follow so seeing how they adjust the Org workflow to meet them is instructive. You shouldn’t think, however, that his post is useful only to those working in the humanities. The same setup will work for any discipline.
Bennett’s tool chain is mainly
- Zotero for library management
- Org-mode and LaTeX to produce PDFs
- org-ref to manage his citations
- PDF tools for reading and marking up papers
- Magit/Git for version control
Zotero is a nice tool and open source so there’s no reason to avoid it but as shown in Kitchin’s video on org-ref you probably don’t need it. Org-ref can download papers in several ways and using it means there’s one less tool to learn and worry about.
One very nice thing about Bennett’s post for beginners is that he doesn’t assume you know how to configure things for a workflow like his and he show’s everything that’s necessary.
This is a nice post and well worth reading if you’re involved in writing papers either professionally or as a student. Bennett explains why he prefers not to use Word or one of its evil progeny but, of course, Irreal readers are already familiar with reasons to avoid them. Really, it’s hard to envision a nicer writing environment than one involving Org and org-ref.