Let me tell you about my old workflow for managing academic literature. It started with adding papers to Zotero, then creating detailed notes in Word documents. I would also copy and paste key figures into these notes. However, as the number of papers grew, my Word documents became overwhelming and messy. I tried organizing them into different folders and documents based on topics like deepwater, climate science, and geochronology, but interdisciplinary papers didn’t fit neatly into these categories. Being organized helps me stay motivated and increases my satisfaction with research.
Then I discovered Notion. I fell in love with its database structure, which allows me to tag each paper with multiple categories, expand notes into individual pages, and track my reading progress. I could finally slice and dice my literature database based on my needs. However, when I tried moving key figures from Word to Notion, the resolution degraded significantly. This pushed me to simplify my workflow and move everything into Notion while keeping the essential steps of reading, digesting, and synthesizing literature.
This is one of my favorite views created by Notion: a topic-wise classification.
While there are plenty of tutorials on integrating Zotero and Notion, many use outdated extensions. The latest version of Notero is much simpler but requires a few tricks to set up. Additionally, I wanted to include journal information for each paper, which isn’t a built-in feature. In this guide, I’ll share my workflow, including how to use Python and the Notion API to semi-automate adding journal information.
What you need
Notion offers several advantages for academic organization:
Notion’s flexibility makes it an ideal companion for Zotero, helping you keep your research organized and accessible.