Managing Bibliography with Emacs, Citar and Zotero

Introduction

When doing any sort of research, it becomes a real chore managing sources. Sources are web sites, books, articles or anything else that you need to reference in your research. It answers the question of “where did I read this?”.

Setup

Zotero is a document and bibliography manager. It’s able to extract and snapshot webpages and generate bibliography like so:

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@inreference{BigDig2024,
    title = {Big {{Dig}}},
    booktitle = {Wikipedia},
    date = {2024-07-28T04:33:34Z},
    url = {https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Big_Dig&oldid=1237102624},
    urldate = {2024-08-02},
    abstract = {The Big Dig was a megaproject in Boston that rerouted the then elevated Central Artery of Interstate 93 that cut across Boston into the O'Neill Tunnel and built the Ted Williams Tunnel to e>
    langid = {english},
    keywords = {estimation construction},
    annotation = {Page Version ID: 1237102624},
    file = {/Users/dmitry/Zotero/storage/5A8ADMJ7/2024 - Big Dig.pdf;/Users/dmitry/Zotero/storage/K4CTZQTC/Big_Dig.html}
}

citar is the emacs package that referenses the bibliography data produced by Zotero to make citations simpler.

Workflow for reading long articles

1. Find a long read article.
2. Use a zotero extension to take a snapshot of it.
3. Generate a “reader view” PDF of the page and import it into zotero.
4. Use M-x citar-open to open the document in org-noter and start incrementally reading it.
5. While summarizing notes (see how to process reading notes) use M-x citar-insert-citation to reference the source material.

References

Really good introduction here: Citations in org-mode: Org-cite and Citar.