Recently, John Kitchin tweeted that he has added the org-ref video to his YouTube play list:
I added a video to a @YouTube playlist https://t.co/8e7HJa0gwx Introduction to org-ref
— John Kitchin (@johnkitchin) November 25, 2018
The video is three years old and I wrote about it back then but on rewatching it, I was struck anew at how astounding org-ref is.
Kitchin begins the video by showing some of the ways you can add a document to your bibliography. It’s like magic. Drag a PDF reference, or a paper’s Web site into your bibliography and org-ref will fetch the paper and a BibTeX entry and insert it into the bibliography for you. You can also copy a reference from an existing paper and when you add it to your bibliography, org-ref will retrieve the paper and the BibTeX entry for you. You can do the same thing by copying a paper’s DOI and asking org-ref to get the paper and BibTeX entry for you.
The rest of the video discusses adding reference to papers, equations, code, and figures to the paper you’re writing. Keep in mind that this is all being done in an Org mode file.
If you’re a researcher, or student, or anyone at all who writes papers with a bibliography you owe it to yourself to watch the video (it’s here on YouTube) and install org-ref. Org mode users often say it’s Emacs’ killer app and reason enough to use Emacs. If you’re writing papers, org-ref could be considered reason enough to use Org mode.