Link Obsidian to Zotero: My Citation Workflow for Scholars and Writers
If you read seriously, for articles or other scholarly work, you already know the problem. You take notes on a book, the notes drift away from the book, and three months later you’re digging through Word documents, paper files, and half-remembered highlights trying to figure out where a quote came f…
If you read seriously, for articles or other scholarly work, you already know the problem. You take notes on a book, the notes drift away from the book, and three months later you’re digging through Word documents, paper files, and half-remembered highlights trying to figure out where a quote came from. The footnote that should take a minute takes an hour.
In this video I walk through the Obsidian and Zotero setup I use to solve that problem. Every note I take on a source is linked directly to its bibliographic entry. Citations go in with a keystroke. Literature notes carry the title, author, and year in their YAML frontmatter so I can query them later. And when I sit down to write, the sources are already where I need them.
This is a practical, screen-shared walkthrough of:
- The Obsidian Citations plugin and how it talks to Zotero through Better BibTeX
- Setting up a Literature Notes folder and a literature-note template
- The citation template I use, formatted as an italicized wikilink to the literature note
- A small fix for the YAML-colon problem that breaks titles with subtitles
- The Pandoc-style citation option for standards-based interoperability
- The three hotkeys I use every day
- A live demo: writing a note on Vos’s The Self-Disclosure of Jesus and linking it through to the source, then on to Bousset’s Kyrios Christos
Square It Away (Action Step) If you write anything serious and you don’t yet have a citation manager, install Zotero this week. If you already use Zotero, install the Obsidian Citations plugin and set up a Literature Notes folder. Even the simplest version of this workflow will save you hours and quietly upgrade everything you write.
Chapters
- 0:00 — Intro: my Obsidian + Zotero citation workflow
- 0:30 — Why this setup matters (and where people get stuck)
- 0:50 — The Citations plugin and your Zotero database path
- 1:30 — Setting up your Literature Notes folder
- 2:30 — Literature note template and YAML frontmatter
- 3:00 — A fix for the YAML-colon problem in titles
- 3:25 — Markdown citation templates with wikilinks
- 4:40 — Pandoc-style citations as an alternative
- 5:10 — Three hotkeys worth memorizing
- 5:35 — Live demo: a note on Vos
- 6:10 — Citing The Self-Disclosure of Jesus
- 6:40 — Why every researcher needs Zotero
- 7:50 — Inside the literature note
- 8:35 — Linking Vos to Bousset’s Kyrios Christos
- 9:25 — Why this frees you up to actually think
- 10:15 — Wrap and what to do this week