Emacs as a fully-fledged reference manager

Vidianos Giannitsis (he/him) - IRC: vidianos, https://github.com/Vidianos-Giannitsis. Vidianos Giannitsis on LinkedIn vidianosgiannitsis@gmail.com

The following image shows where the talk is in the schedule for Sat 2025-12-06. Solid lines show talks with Q&A via BigBlueButton. Dashed lines show talks with Q&A via IRC or Etherpad.

Format: 20-min talk ; Q&A: BigBlueButton conference room https://media.emacsconf.org/2025/current/bbb-reference.html
Discuss on IRC: #emacsconf
Status: Waiting for video from speaker

Description

Even though all of my note-taking and literature organization infrastructure has been in Emacs for a few years, I haven't been able to make myself independent from a literature manager (Zotero in my case) until recently. Zotero was just too convenient. You can capture articles seamlessly (although downloading attachments didn't always work as intended), organize them in directories and take a quick look at your lists to determine what to read next, before you move on to actually reading them and taking notes.

This year, I finally decided that I am tired of this and I will find a way to do this fully in Emacs. This talk will be discussing my findings in this regard. A lot of this was built in Ebib. It turns out that a lot of what I considered useful for this workflow was already available through this excellent software, built inside Emacs. Not everything worked as I wanted on installation, but naturally, this is Emacs, so I just hacked my way through getting the exact behaviour I wanted. This required integration with other tools and especially a closer interaction between Ebib and Org-roam. This came out incredible and I am now very happy with using it, so I thought I should also showcase it in EmacsConf!

With this integration ready, only capturing articles from the web remains. Zotra can capture articles in a way about as seamless as Zotero's (it actually uses Zotero's translators, but from Emacs). Attachments remain a problem sometimes, but that's publishers making attachments hard to get because third party software can't see that you have full access to them, so I have decided to do those mostly manually, I often did that with Zotero anyways.

Relevant links:

• Zotra - Capturing Articles
• Ebib - Organizing literature before and after reading
• Org-Roam - The missing link to create an effective reading list
• Bibtex Completion - Useful tools for manipulating literature

About the speaker:

I'm Vidianos and I'm currently doing my PhD in KU Leuven in Belgium. Working on research means I have a need for good tools to help me with my research. I have been using Emacs for roughly 5 years now and I can confidently say it is the number one tool that helps me with this research. This talk will be all about how it helps me and about finally being able to remove external reference managers from my workflow, something I have wanted for years, but that I haven't managed to do before this.

Questions or comments? Please e-mail vidianosgiannitsis@gmail.com