helm-bibtex VS Dotfiles

This on its own is a great system for writing such notes. However, it is very lacking in searchability. If you want the notes, you need to go find them. To solve this, you first need a package to manage your bibliography in Emacs. These function with a .bib file that I assume you already can obtain through Mendeley. To my knowledge, there are two great packages for this, citar and bibtex-completion (which is actually two packages ivy-bibtex and helm-bibtex). Depending on the completion framework you are using (Ivy, Helm or Vertico/Selectrum) you can use one of these. These packages read from a bibliography file and make your life so much easier in finding the research paper you are looking for. They also have another neat feature. They allow you to create notes for your bibtex entries with ready customisable templates. This makes this whole process so much easier as you can find a paper you want to read, create a note for it with one of these packages and then link it to its pdf with org-noter. This way you have a fully-fledged research workflow inside Emacs.

I have a question regarding org-ref, bibtex-completion and ivy-bibtex respectively. I have org-ref set up as suggested by John Kitchin on his github page. This is some of the relevant code, i guess.

no multiple selection (ivy has it, but not ivy-bibtex, see https://github.com/tmalsburg/helm-bibtex/issues/308)

There is already a completing-read implementation of helm-bibtex/ivy-bibtex in the works which is supposed to be used with Selectrum/Icomplete/Consult etc. See https://github.com/tmalsburg/helm-bibtex/pull/361 and https://github.com/tmalsburg/helm-bibtex/pull/355. Maybe you can collaborate with /u/bdarcus?

This got me pointed in the right direction. I just need to now write the helper function to grab that extended metadata.

I also second the suggestion of another poster on counsel, swiper, ivy, etc. (I love this suite and the various add-ons). I'd add ivy-bibtex.

For describing my workflow very briefly (not as well as Sonke Ahrens in the aforementioned book, but I will try), I try to follow the main points of Zettelkasten. Whenever you learn something, take notes about it. Make the notes brief, but very descriptive. Give it a large title describing everything contained in it so you can find it easier later. If its too large, split it into multiple files, so the note is atomic (meaning it can no longer be separated into multiple files). If you don't have time to write a note correctly, make a fleeting note about it to remind you and write it later. Densely link your notes with one another. Thinking about the connections between notes is sometimes half the work of writing it. This way, I never lose information. If I need something later down the line, I can always search with org-roam-node-find, as I use very descriptive titles as I mentioned. If not, there is also grep, which if you are not aware is a text editing utility that allows for searching all your notes. There are many grep tools in Emacs (i.e. counsel-rg being the one I use personally). For more explanation, you can check my literate org-mode config.

There is definitely a way to do this in Citar which should be mentioned in the wiki if you read through it (and if there is not the author of the package is very helpful in general) but I do not know what that is. This way, when you select a bibtex entry it will automatically create a note with the title being the title of the article, automatically associate the entry with its pdf and ready org-noter for use to annotate it. Its a very streamlined and automated way to work with this system of packages that I highly recommend. For more info on this, you can also look at my literate config for notetaking which naturally has a lot as I take tons of notes. Link to it is here.

For more info on my workflow, you can check my config over on github. This part is specific to my org roam, references and general note taking workflow, so you won't have to look for the relevant parts. Its a literate config and I explain some things more than I do here. If this all interests you I suggest giving it a check. I also couldn't recommend Ahrens' book more. Its an incredible read for academics of every science as its really applicable everywhere imo.

Also if something is not clear here you can check out my full i3 config over on github.