digest
Hey guys. So, in this super quick video, I'll try to explain my Obsidian setup that I use for reading research papers and also storing them. It's super easy to set up, really fun to use, super productive, and looks absolutely amazing. So the first thing you'll need is these extensions, which are Color Tags, Paper Importer, PDF++, and Surfing.
Paper Importer is what is used to import papers from arXiv. PDF++ is the best PDF reader in Obsidian. You can look up more on YouTube videos as well as talks. Surfing allows you to surf the web inside of Obsidian. And Color Tags allow you to tag all of your papers by specific topics, which is very useful for me specifically.
So I'll just go directly to an example. I'll use my own paper, which was just recently accepted at ICML 2025. I'll copy the URL and press Ctrl+P to import the paper. It gets imported super fast, and what it does is create two pages. The first one is a notes page, which is what you're seeing now, and it also has the actual PDF of the imported paper.
A great thing about PDF++ is these options called autocopy and autopaste. What this means is that if I try to copy anything, like if I highlight anything here in the paper, it will also automatically show up on the notes page. Here I can write additional notes about anything I find cool in the paper. The best part is that it creates a backlink. If I go anywhere in the paper and click on this note, I go exactly to where that note was created. This is not all. Another great thing is you can also take box screenshots, which are basically images, and then add text here in the same way. That also works, and it's pretty good.
Another really cool thing, which I personally find super useful, is that if you hover over any citation and then press Command, that citation opens up in a web page right inside Obsidian, with the title, abstract, and the PDF all available in one click. This is super useful and removes a lot of the friction we have with normal citations.
Another super useful feature is that in many research papers, a lot of content is pushed to the appendix. For example, here we have a lemma, and the proof is pushed to Appendix 8.1. Instead of going all the way there or clicking here, I can hover over it, press Command, and that opens the proof in a small window. This is really useful because I don't have to skip to any point in the PDF. I can view the lemma right here, see the proof, and then move on.
Another really cool thing, which I mentioned earlier, is tags. I use Color Tags to build a graph of my papers. If you see tags like #graphs and #project multimodal explainability, I like to cluster my papers by tags or topics. What I usually do is open any paper and add tags like this so they're accessible from here. Anything related to any tag opens up here, and then I can go find it. So this is a super simple, easy-to-set-up pipeline for Obsidian.