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I’ve been using Zotero for over a year now. It is one of the elements that allowed me to leave Evernote, as it can automagically fetch scientific papers and their metadata for me, store web pages, clip PDFs from my browser etc.

Thanks to Nick Milo and Eleanor Konik discussing Eleanor’s Zotero/Obsidian workflow on YouTube, I found Bryan Jenks’ video on the same topic. Bryan Jenks’ nicely explains something I had seen other people reference.

First he discusses two Zotero plugins that are very useful to me:

  • Zotfile, this allows me to annotate and comment an article, and then extract and store that inside Zotero, with links back to the paper and the location in the paper the annotations and articles belong to.
  • MDnotes, which allows you to export material from Zotero in markdown.

Together they allow me to higlight and annotate an article, and export that as notes into my Obsidian notes. Even better, those notes have the links to the paper and page of an annotation still in them. Clicking them opens up Zotero in the right article, in the right spot. This way context is maintained while I further process my notes, and the actual reference is just a single click away.

This is already very nice and smooth.

Then towards the end he mentions another very useful thing: Dean Jackson‘s Alfred workflow for Zotero, Zothero, which a.o. allows fancy search methods of my Zotero database right from my main screen.

Half an hour very well spent, thanks to Bryan Jenkins.

2 reactions on “Connecting Zotero and Obsidian, AlfredApp”

  2. Amazingly useful plugins keep getting made for Obsidian. Plugins that help reduce friction to getting my material from other sources into flat markdown files that I then can edit, rework and do with as I see fit. Earlier I mentioned the Zotero plugins to extract PDF highlights and Zotero links into Obsidian. Today I started using the Kindle highlights plugin. It connects either to your Amazon account or you feed it your myclippings.txt file from your Kindle device.
    It then pulls in your highlights into one note file for each book. You can edit the template for that note, to make sure it includes the information and metadata you want. Each highlight has a link directly to the highlight in your book, and when I click it opens my Kindle app on my Mac and jumps right to it.
    Previously I would either download a CSV through the export notes function on a Kindle device which mails you your notes, or copy the myclippings.txt.
    Using myclippings.txt is still the only way to get highlights from a book you did not add to a Kindle through Amazon (e.g. a direct upload from my Calibre library).
    With one click, upon my first sync I now have about 100 notes with highlights from books I read. I never was a heavy highlighter, because of the friction of getting those highlights to a place where I could use them. That may now change.
    Image: a screenshot of how highlights from one of my books now show up as notes in a markdown file, using the default template.

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