Wouter Spekkink has an interesting post on his workflow for writing academic papers using Emacs and Org-mode. It’s a long post because he wrote it for several different audiences. He starts with what Emacs and Org-mode are and why someone not familiar with them might find it worthwhile to learn them. He considers the question of why one would want to “do this.” He mentions things like version control and the advantages of working with plain text but I doubt it will convince anyone. Either you embrace plain text with all its upsides and downsides or your prefer to live in—what I consider—the dystopia of Word and its evil siblings.
The most useful part of his post, for me, discusses his setup for actually writing papers. That includes both the boilerplate in the document itself and his configuration. He’s a Doom Emacs user so it may not be completely transparent if you worship in a different sect of the Emacs church but it’s reasonably easy to make the translation.
Spekkink also discusses how he integrates Org-roam and bibliography processing into his workflow. He uses the excellent org-ref to handle his citations and bibliography and org-roam and org-noter to organize his notes.
Much of Spekkink’s workflow is informed by a post from 2019 by Jonathan Bennett, which is also excellent. I’ll probably write about Bennett’s post later. In the mealtime, take a look at Spekkink’s post if you’re interested in writing academic papers with org-mode.