Three Essential Obsidian Community Plugins My PhD Couldn’t Do Without

On a day-to-day basis, I don’t use that many plugins in Obsidian. Firstly I like to keep everything fairly simple. I don’t want to take the risk of something breaking and not functioning as expected. I also currently do not like the complexity that can arise from all the different formatting options; callouts, tables, task-related features etc.

I like to keep it highly functional but simple at the same time. That being said there are a few plugins that are essential to how I conduct my PhD.

Here’s an in detail look at them. If you need more information on how they work, leave a comment down below and I’ll try and help you.

Citations

The ‘Citations’ plugin by Jon Gauthier, I think, must be the single most important plugin that has revolutionised how I read and write in my PhD. It is able to sync with Zotero (my reference manager) by pulling in a citation from a regularly updated bibliography file in my vault. For my non-coding self, it is literally magic.

I use the Zotero Connector web plugin to send the paper I want to read to Zotero. I have Better BibTeX installed to get custom Citation Keys. These keys are used across my work; in Zotero, as the title of the new page in Obsidian and as the citekey in OverLeaf. It makes everything consistent and easy to remember across different platforms. Occasionally I have to edit these, but they are usually correctly formatted.

In Obsidian, to import a citation I use the hotkey combo ‘Ctrl’ + ‘Shift’ + ‘O’ and then start typing the first author’s last name. That usually comes up with the one I need, but occasionally I have to type in something more specific like the paper title. After selecting the paper and pressing enter, the Citations plugin auto-populates the new note with the title, authors list, year, journal, a link to the Zotero file for when I read it and an abstract. I have a number of headings I also put into the import template so that it’s all ready for me to add my own summaries and notes.

Each citation also comes in with the tag #journal/low which means that it’s easy to tell which ones I haven’t read. Immediately on importing the citation I add another tag to denote whether it’s ‘originalresearch’, a ‘reviewpaper’ or an ‘opinion’. If it’s a particularly relevant paper, I might add ‘keypaper’ as a tag too. I then add keywords which are taken from the title and a very quick glance at the abstract. This serves two purposes. Firstly, is this paper still relevant? If the selection of tags used isn’t useful, then the paper itself will probably not be great. Secondly, it’s much easier to fit a paper into ‘ideas’ when categorised into broad areas first.

It’s also taught me a lot about what makes a good title! The best titles are littered with keywords which aren’t too specific but are still situational and make it really easy to place the paper into context with other papers.

This plugin helps immensely with being able to provide this first pass of a research paper. And it brings me nicely onto the next essential plugin…

Dataview

I don’t currently understand ‘Dataview’ enough to talk about it in a complex way. I use it in it simplest form, but it does exactly what I need it to.

Basically Dataview creates a giant table of all the relevant papers with the tag that I have specified. When it gets really interesting is using a group of tags, because the number of papers that share two or more tags diminishes very quickly. It means I can quite easily find highly relevant papers on what I’m writing without getting two specific too quickly.

I can order the result how I like. At the moment I use date. Once I’ve read a paper, I make sure to put a brief sentence or two in the ‘Major Findings’ YAML which is very powerful way of both understanding what the paper was about, but also remembering what the paper was about. I can also see which ones I haven’t read yet!

Having the link pop up in the table makes it very easy to check back to the original paper.

Tag Wrangler

Because a major part of this system is based around tags, I need to use ‘Tag Wrangler’ occasionally. Not a lot, but when I do it’s essential. It’s usually when I decide to expand the naming of a tag. For example, I used to just have ‘productivity’ (of plants) as a tag. I then wanted to have a ‘yield’ tag too, but although technically different things, they relate to the same idea which is ‘growing more’. I don’t like to have my tags too fine-grained because then I spend more time working out which tag it goes with than doing something more useful like actually reading the paper.

So I keep them around broad themes. If they overlap too much, then they need to be merged, hence the usefulness of ‘Tag Wrangler.’ If I want to go into more specifics, then I go into sub-tags.

A Word About Tags

The reason I rely on tags so much this stage (to which others may disagree with), is because I haven’t yet read the paper. How can I use an ‘ideas-based’ system if I haven’t actually read the research paper? What if their idea is different from my idea?

At this stage, all I’m doing is creating a curated library by batching the import process so that when I want to work on ideas, I don’t need to expose myself to the rabbit holes that are Google/Web of Science/Research Rabbit etc.

Yes, sometimes I forget a tag or miss one. Sometimes I create a tag at a later date that earlier papers would benefit from. Chances are when I read the paper, it’ll get new tags, or actually more often, they get removed. That’s OK. Tags are just a first pass. Anything else will resurface later anyway through other search methods. Initially, it’s a tag and forget, but when I’m writing, I still need to do the research, I just know that I can do it quicker in my vault than on the web. Tags just facilitate the process rather than act as a be all and end all.

And Finally…

I do also use ‘Calendar’, ‘Paste to URL’ and ‘Better Word Count’, but these are minor time savers and tools to guide me rather than contributing to the functionality and process of my PhD.

So there you have it! Three super essential plugins that have literally changed my life (for the better hopefully)! I’d love to hear about any others that you use and can’t live without!

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