LINKS
Explore how I used Obsidian for academic papers using my dissertation as an example.
The files are available to browse on my GitHub.
CONTENTS
OVERVIEW
Academic papers are designed to be comprehensive, not readable. These papers contain insights that could help other engineers and developers, but they’re locked behind thousands of words of academic jargon.
Enter knowledge bases: instead of linear documents, you create interconnected notes that let readers explore topics at their own pace. I rebuilt my entire dissertation in Obsidian, and it’s so much easier to follow! Read on to see what I learned while using Obsidian for academic papers.
BACKGROUND
Obsidian is a powerful note-taking app that turns markdown files into an interconnected knowledge base. What I love about it is the way you can link ideas together; with enough on there, you start to see connections between everything you’ve researched (and get ideas for a new Fusion Forge segment…).
It also boasts a range of community plugins that enable better templates, JavaScript insertion, and more.
I use it for my personal and tech notes, and I figured it would be the perfect place to put research notes. Let’s explore some of the lessons I learned using Obsidian for academic papers (with my dissertation as an example).
1. Keep the report flow using Maps of Contents
Most technical papers will follow a similar format: Summary -> Introduction -> Literature Review -> Methods -> Results / Discussion -> Conclusion -> References.
My initial instinct was to have folders to hold all the content for each of these sections, but I ran into two issues:
- When decomposing them into individual notes, many spanned multiple report sections (but you can only put a file in one folder).
- Many of the concepts were not specific to this report, but were general engineering or biology principles that could be used elsewhere.
I instead decided to put individual notes in a Concepts folder and use Maps of Contents (MOCs) to link them together.
MOCs are high-level overview notes that help you organise and navigate related notes in Obsidian. Instead of relying on folder structures, MOCs act like dynamic tables of contents linking out to more detailed notes. I created one for each report section as a starting point for readers and to contextualise the concepts. You can even create a MOC for your MOCs, which is essentially what the homepage for that project is.
2. Link your knowledge base, but start small
Links are a first-class citizen in Obsidian. They are valuable when navigating through information, and you should link your notes wherever you can. If you’re using Obsidian for academic papers, they can be especially useful for deep dives into concepts, and to relate notes, equations and assumptions together.
However, it can be very easy to fall into a rabbit hole and start creating links for everything. It makes sense to link my dissertation to a page on “Pumps”, but even that can link out to Pressure, Flow Rate, Shear Stress…
It’s tempting to go through each branch and fill out every note, but focus on the goal of the paper. You can create a stub link (one for which a page hasn’t been created yet) or even just leave it unlinked.
If you end up creating a page for it later, Obsidian will show you any unlinked mentions for you to fill out.
3. Host your notes online
If you want other people to view your notes, or even if you want a cleaner, more accessible view, hosting your notes online is a great idea.
Obsidian offers a paid service to publish your notes, which is certainly the easiest and most reliable way to get started.
However, I decided to go with Quartz, an application built on NodeJS to serve your Obsidian files. The instructions on the website are super easy to follow if you want to try it out yourself.
I deployed and hosted mine on the subdomain knowledge.aashishmehta.com.
CONCLUSIONS
There’s still a lot for me to learn about knowledge graphs and how to use them effectively, but there is certainly value in using Obsidian for academic papers.
I hope you found the example useful!
