Ashton Wiersdorf has a nice post on how he organizes papers, notes, and citations for his research. Of course, Emacs is at the center of that process and it’s another aspect of Emacs use that fascinates me. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Kiran Gopinathan’s method of doing paper reviews, which overlaps considerably with Wiersdorf’s post. Two and a half years ago, I wrote how John Kitchin does the same thing.
Wiersdorf is a self-described Emacs maximalist but he is, nevertheless, also a heavy Zotero user. I’ve written about Zotero many times before. It a package for storing, managing, and building the bibliographies for papers. See this Wikipedia article for details. Wiersdorf’s post describes how he combines Zotero and Emacs to manage his research papers.
He also recommends the citar package for handling citations. John Kitchin’s Org-ref is another excellent choice for this but the citar package works well with Zotero. Lots of folks swear by Zotero and if you’re one of those people, citar may be for you.
The other major package that Wiersdorf uses is Protesilaos Stavrou’s Denote. He describes it as a Zettelkasten-like package. Gopinathan uses Org-roam for the same thing so you should take a look at both packages to see which you like best.
Finally, Wiersdorf uses the citar-denote package to integrate denote and citar. It ties citar and denote together and allows you to easily access papers from their citation. Take a look at Wiersdorf’s post for some details.
The most important thing, Wiersdorf says, is to use Emacs to build your own system. It’s not an editor, he says, but a toolkit to build your ideal editor. That’s differs a bit from my usual definition but is certainly a good description. Regardless, the goal is to make Emacs into an editor that meets your exact needs.