How to use Obsidian as a researcher

I’ve been using the free, open-source application Obsidian since 2021 and it has turned my work as an academic upside down. I was never really disorganised: I would write long summaries for my university courses in Microsoft Word, collect my references and citations in Citavi projects, and store my PDFs in folders in folders in folders in folders. My workflow was workable, but it had a good amount of friction, especially whenever I wanted to link ideas and content across formats and applications. Upon discovering Obsidian, it took me a while to get the hang of it, but it did not take me long to see how this application has the potential to become my one thinking platform that is fully under my own control. After tinkering with it for almost five years, I’ve compiled the lessons that I’ve learned into a self-study guide that can help you become a more productive, efficient, and relaxed academic.

The guide is freely available via GitHub under a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.

Quick elevator pitch for Obsidian: it’s a free, open-source knowledge base that helps you organize, link, and expand your thoughts using plain-text Markdown files stored locally on your device.¹ You can imagine Obsidian as a browser that allows you to access, edit, and link your notes that live as Markdown files in a folder on your computer, without a paid subscription or even an internet connection. From there, you can take your Obsidian in pretty much any direction: its customisability is perhaps its greatest strength, and the community of Obsidian users keeps developing plugins that add any functionality you could think of to the application. To me as a researcher, the principal appeal has been to build a dynamic, interconnected web of knowledge where everything I read, write, and think lives in one place where it communicates with each other, is fully searchable, and under my own control.

Aimed at researchers from all disciplines and at any career stage, the guide covers the most important features of Obsidian and explains how to make them work for you as an academic. It covers the basics (how to install Obsidian, what the Markdown file format is etc.) and gradually builds up from there up to the full academic writing workflow that shuts out Microsoft Word for good. The ten tasks can be studied in any order, and I’ve included four possible trajectories depending on your needs and preferences. Every task includes detailed instructions and background information on why something works the way it does, and what use cases you as an academic might have for a certain feature. Completing all the tasks will (at least that’s my ambition) put you in the position to use Obsidian to build a personal knowledge management system that is tailored to you, and that removes friction and frustration to allow you to focus on the essential.

And just to be clear: you don’t need to be a computer genius to make Obsidian work for you. No coding required. All you need is the willingness to make conscious choices about your workflow, and to invest a bit of time in building a system that is future-proof, flexible, scalable, traceable, and under your own control. This investment will pay off many times over. Obsidian isn’t the only way to achieve this, but a really good one.