A complete workflow from collecting literature, managing PDFs and reading notes to drafting the paper and inserting references.
Collect web pages, database records and PDFs in Zotero, managing titles, authors, journals and DOIs in one place.
Create folders by project or paper topic first to keep the library from becoming messy later.
Add tags, notes and reading status to references, and check that PDFs are correctly attached.
Use 3–5 core tags; don't make the tag system too fine-grained.
Create Markdown notes for important papers, recording the research question, methods, results, limitations and quotable points.
For every paper, keep at least one sentence on "how this paper helps my research".
Organise the introduction, methods, results and discussion according to the paper's structure, turning literature notes into paragraphs.
Build the logical framework first, then polish the language.
Manage citation formatting with the Zotero Word/LibreOffice plugin or BibTeX/BibLaTeX.
Before submission, check citation style, DOIs, author spelling and duplicate entries.
