ox-pandoc VS org-ref

You can use the ox-pandoc library to export from Org Mode in Emacs to 65 different formats (at time of writing) including all the ones you mention.

For some formats that pandoc does not output, there are also specialised ox-format libraries.

There are even several exporters to Github-flavoured markdown. I personally find both ox-pandoc and ox-gfm very useful for that purpose.

https://github.com/kawabata/ox-pandoc

Orgmode's page about tools about import & export actually includes both to an entry about export to pandoc (ox-pandoc) as well as import from pandoc (org-pandoc-import).

You need to install some package for that; have a look at https://github.com/kawabata/ox-pandoc for example.

The ox-pandoc package is really useful (you need to have pandoc itself installed) and can export to epub using just the export function of org-mode itself. (That, in turn, is described thoroughly in the org manual.)

It's always nice to see someone from the humanities interested in Emacs. I suspect that you'll find the best experience by using Org mode + Pandoc. This will let you write in a rather nice plaintext environment, and then export that to a .docx file. I don't think the styling will be great (could well be wrong though), but it should work fairly well :) Importing (from .docx to .org) is likely to be less smooth, but still decent.

Can also export directly to word through pandoc as well; there's a package ox-pandoc, which lets you do just that, and you can even include a reference document in case you need to have custom styles added to it.

If you want an easy, bare bones PDF export that is not LaTeX and doesn't require a bunch of fiddling to make it not look an LaTeX article, using ox-pandoc with the "mspdf" export (using pdfroff as the pdf generator) is decent. It doesn't support embedded images, but is otherwise pretty robust.

I love org mode for scientific writing (especially with org-ref [0]) but it’s just not very convenient for collaborative projects because there are very few emacs users (in my field at least). Overleaf has been workable in my experience, but I still get pushback sometimes.

A diff-aware org-latex import would be amazing for this actually, like if pandoc could do tex -> org but align all the code blocks / generated figures

[0]: https://github.com/jkitchin/org-ref

Hi All, I'm a long time user of the org-ref package for writing academic documents in org and exporting to PDF via LaTeX.

Do you have experience with org-ref? If so, would you be able to help me out and tell me why you prefer Citar? It looks very interesting.

doi-utils, part of org-ref, has functions to add bib entries from DOIs.

Sorry, I'm not using org-ref myself yet. However, I think it pretty much addresses your use-case.