How I use a reference manager in my PhD

A zettelkasten is not enough if you're an academic, student, writer, journalist, etc., etc. - you need a reference manager, too. Even if you don't write for a living, it can be extremely helpful to accurately save your references to share with others and come back to later. The reference manager I use in my PhD is Paperpile. Thank you to Paperpile for sponsoring this video!

✨TIMESTAMPS✨
0:00 - Intro
3:18 - The what and why of citations
4:36 - Necessity of a reference manager
5:59 - The reference manager I use
7:23 - Reference management tutorial
13:27 - Annotating PDFs
15:19 - Microsoft Word integration
19:36 - Conclusion

✨MEDIA USED✨

[bruzm.]

Wow! Thanks a million! I was accepted as an MA student just a few days ago. Now, I'm watching a lesson on "how to manage references". Thank you, thank you and thank you! I can clearly see my 2 MA years regulated, neat, clean, diciplined and stress-free, having watched this.

[SteveTornes-vfpr]

That's "The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins" behind you. I absolutely love that book

[Kenonharp]

Good video. However, it assumes (as you state at the beginning ) that you have already ported your notes from the reference manager into Obsidian. All good, except in the your previous video from several years ago, you are using Zotero. Nowhere do i find a video that actual details the porting of the reference manager notes (be they in Zotero or Paper Pile) into Obsidian. It's is like this step is just assumed. In the present video that process is complete. There are numerous Youtube videos on scripts to do this. Most are confusing at best. Could your do one, for us uninitiated, that shows taking a set of Paper Pile (or Zotero) notes and importing them into Obsidian. My apologies if this is covered somewhere that I can not see. Thanks.

[axxarax]

God you are impressive! There is only one problem... For me who is just starting to study at a higher level, this is pure Greek (lives in Sweden). Sorry for my bad English, Google trasnsnslate is my current way of communicating with the "world". I understand that a reference system is worth its weight in gold when studying, but perhaps I would have liked paperpile to have been able to tell me which page I took the abstract from - right? Often in my education, we are also thrown a lot of pdfs that we have to refer to in our home exams - does paperpile also solve this for me? My questions are endless, and I am so impressed with you and your work, but for me as a newbie to the world of studies, I would have liked more of a concrete explanation of what paperpile can do for me. Short and concise. Thanks for very informative videos and thanks for sharing your valuable knowledge! Hug Stefan, from Sweden.

[ArttuViljakainen]

PaperPile looks really promising, but it's also so difficult to commit to using a new tool, especially if it is not local first (like Obsidian). Atm I annotate in GoodNotes and use Obsidian for everything else, but switching from GN to PaperPile would would allow me to manage references in the same place I annotate. Really tempting, and the app did look pretty good on iPad as well (that's how I read & annotate).

Obsidian and PaperPile will still be quite detached which is a concern, but maybe exporting annotations to ref note is enough (using PDFs in Obsidian is not that smooth).

[anupoti]

Thanks so much for all your videos! How would you compare Paperline and Zotero?

[Caroline_Creative]

Can you have a source in multiple folders without duplicating it? Like to keep track of what was used for a certain paper? If you use the same source often?

[sarojchettri]

What is the difference between Zotero and Paperpal? Both do the same. Can you explain why you moved from Zotero to Paperpal?

[thebadjer]

Does paper pile only work if you have the Google ecosystem?