I need not mention how much information there is on the internet on studying.
How to study, when to study, what to do in preparation for studying, and what to use when studying. I want to focus on the latter today.
There are a million and one different apps that claim to make life easier for students, and during my first year at university, I had to try a few things out to find the ones that were actually worth any time.
I’ve now done this, narrowing my studying toolkit down to three apps (not including a browser to do those kinds of activities, and not including RStudio, which is a prerequisite for my course).
I’d like to share them with you in this article, as well as how I connect them in one place so that you can get an idea of how to cut through the noise that’s around this subject and build a stack that’s going to actually help you get work done rather than distract you.
Zotero
I study Zoology. It’s a science subject that requires quite a lot of referencing when I’m writing essays and lab reports. For this reason, I found a way to manage all the sources that I was using.
Zotero is the best reference manager that I’ve come across, by quite a long way. It’s open-source, feature-rich and extensible with plugins.
It has an excellent browser extension which you can use to import the metadata of a source as well as a PDF file of the source from the source’s site on the internet.
I use a couple of plugins to help me integrate my references with the other parts of my system. Zotfile is for adding citekeys, renaming and moving the PDFs that are imported from the internet. Better BibTeX is for creating a local .bib bibliography of your library and keeping it in sync with the changes you make to your information when in the app.
Other offers such as EndNote and Mendeley don’t compare when it comes to features like these.
Anki
This is the only app I’ve found worth using when it comes to learning content.
It functions using flashcards — you can write cards that have a prompt, with you pressing a button or a key on the keyboard to show the correct response for the prompt. Then you record how easily you were able to respond to the flashcard’s prompt.
The settings are in-depth and completely customisable, so that you can learn at the pace and frequency that suits you best, or that suits the short time you might have left for revision before your exam (guilty!).
Anki makes use of an algorithm that harnesses the science behind spaced repetition and active recall. How quickly it will show you the same card again depends upon how many times you’ve seen it before, and the recorded ease that you last had responding to the prompt. You can learn more about the science behind memory, including why Anki’s strategies work in the book Make it Stick by Peter C. Brown.
Obsidian
I could use both of the apps above and still be nowhere without Obsidian. It’s my hub, the second brain where everything integrates with each other.
Obsidian’s used for taking lecture notes, as well as writing longer pieces that I need to submit. I can integrate the power of AI to help me with these things, and all the notes are offline, on my computer.
What’s not to love?
So how do I connect Zotero and Anki to Obsidian?
With two plugins. I’ll talk about the one I use for Zotero first.
There are several options in the community plugins section of Obsidian, but the most popular one, and the one I use, is called Citations.
Remember the Zotero plugin Better BibTeX that syncs your library to a .bib file on your system?
The Citations plugin makes use of this file. You specify the file’s location in Citations’ settings and now the plugin can read all the information about your library of sources. You can use the plugin to insert markdown citations in your manuscript, as well as take your Zotero notes and annotations from PDFs and create literature notes within your vault.
This saves a lot of time when you’re writing and compiling your manuscripts. Another Obsidian plugin that I recommend for this is the Pandoc Plugin, which allows you to convert your markdown files into perfectly formatted PDFs, ready for submission to assignments.
For Anki, you can use the Obsidian plugin Flashcards. By installing the Anki plugin AnkiConnect, you can integrate the two together. This allows you to import cards from your Obsidian notes into Anki seamlessly, using a command.
Decks, tags, organisation, formatting and card type are all adjustable within Obsidian, leaving Anki as a place dedicated to actually learning rather than just writing cards. In Obsidian, complex formulae can be dealt with using the plugin LaTeX Suite, and you can use the power of AI in QuickAdd to generate flashcards from your notes without having to do any extra manual work.
Integrating everything using Obsidian allows you to be a lot more efficient when studying, and managing all aspects of your work from a single point.
However, you should find the tools that work best for your own use case. I highly recommend Obsidian because of the above, but the idea is that you should pick something that helps you get the work done in the least possible time so that you can focus on progressing your other projects too.
I hope that you’ve learned something from this article that you can put into practice, and thanks for reading!