Gregory Stein, over at Caches to Caches, has a great post on a novel application of Org Mode. Stein is an academic who reads a lot of papers. It’s important for a researcher to not only read the latest research but to have some means of recalling it. I’ve been writing a lot lately about the Zettelkasten idea. That’s a method for recording ideas and linking them together based on context.
Stein’s post describes an idea that’s not quite a Zettelkasten but has some of the same features. Stein wants a bibliography of the papers he reads along with a short note describing why he thinks the paper is interesting and possibly useful in future research. The parallel with a Zettelkasten is obvious.
It turns out that Orb Babel has a bibtex code block in which you can specify the elements of a bibtex entry. Once you know that, the rest is easy. Stein adds a (sub)heading for each paper that contains his commentary on the paper and then the Babel code block with the paper’s bibliographic information. The commentary can contain \cite references to link this paper to related papers. That gives him the best of two worlds. He has all the information in a single file that’s easy to search using Org or even a simple grep and he can export the bibliographic data to a bibtex file by exporting it with Org tangle.
Take a look at Stein’s post for the details and a sample file entry. He also shows the exported resort so you can see the power of the method. As I said, it’s not quite a Zettelkasten but embraces the same idea: record ideas and link them by context.