digest
Short Summary
Main recommendation: Use Obsidian with a few community plugins (Paper Importer, PDF++, Surfing, and Color Tags) as a single workspace for reading, annotating, citing, and organizing research papers. The speaker says the setup is quick to configure and makes paper review more productive, with notes linked directly to the source text.
Key Points
- Paper Importer pulls papers from arXiv by pasting a URL and pressing Ctrl+P to run the import command, creating a notes page alongside the PDF.
- PDF++ with autocopy and autopaste automatically transfers highlights from the PDF into the notes page, and each note links back to its exact location in the paper.
- Hovering over a citation and pressing Command opens the cited paper's web page inside Obsidian, showing title, abstract, and PDF.
- Hovering over an appendix reference (such as a lemma's proof pushed to an appendix) and pressing Command shows the content in a small window, avoiding jumps through the PDF.
- Color Tags let the speaker tag papers by topic (for example #graphs or a project name) to cluster papers and build a graph view.
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions:
- Install the plugins: Color Tags, Paper Importer, PDF++, and Surfing.
- To import a paper, copy its arXiv URL and press Ctrl+P, then run the Paper Importer command. This creates two pages: a notes page and the PDF.
- Use PDF++ autocopy/autopaste by highlighting text in the PDF; the highlight appears on the notes page, and you can add your own notes there.
- Use box screenshots in PDF++ to capture figures or regions and add text notes beside them in the same way.
- Hover over a citation or appendix reference and press Command to open it in a preview window.
- Add topic tags (such as #graphs or a project tag) to each paper's notes so related papers can be found from the tag and shown in the graph.
- Paper Importer is specifically for arXiv papers, so the workflow described applies to arXiv sources.
- The speaker demonstrated the workflow using their own paper accepted at ICML 2025.
- Backlinks from notes return to the exact spot in the PDF where the note was made.
Bottom Line
This is a lightweight, plugin-based pipeline in Obsidian that connects reading, note-taking, citation lookup, and topic organization for research papers, with the main benefit being fewer steps between reading and recording ideas.
