I started a PhD in 2020 and I know exactly why you created this app because I tried like half a dozen different tools that didn’t fit. I needed a workflow to

1. collect and prioritize relevant research papers

2. make notes and synthesize ideas across my reading

3. use the notes to assemble draft of original writing

4. seamlessly move my own writings into LaTeX documents along with citation details

and ended up in Obsidian where I basically had to build my own tool anyway. Which I never did, because I just wanted to focus on research without fooling around with tools.

I ended up with Emacs and org-mode. One of my friends used Vim and Pandoc to the same effect. I didn't quite have to write my own tool but each new LaTeX template foisted on me was hours of work that could have been spent doing research. My impression after seeing my peers work with Mendeley, Notion, Overleaf, etc. was they looked prettier at first glance but didn't solve my problem.

Over time I developed the opinion that LaTeX is an unnecessary tax on scientific progress. It's insanity to keep using it when HTML exists.

My/our setup for papers is: Latex installation on laptop, (home, work, conferences) + private Github repo + Zotero (with notes and highlighting directly in the PDFs) + notes.md for thoughts/ideas etc.

Team members all have local Latex installs as they have CS/math backgrounds.

Works well, easy to onboard new colleagues. Probably harder if there were people with other backgrounds (MBA), however an industrial designer on the team also uses GitHub for basic pull/commit.

For my fiction writing, I also use local Latex install+GitHub.

Just thinking out loud as someone who's been in a similar situation...

There are a ton of tools that claim to be one stop shops, but of course, almost none have all the features you would want.

Hence it makes sense to separate the different parts (to use tools that are excellent/powerful at any one task), and use some intermediary in the middle. Of course this isn't as efficient and frictionless as possible, but it allows compatibility.

I suppose in today's "everything is a file" computing paradigm, files (or folders) with data are probably the closest? It is far from perfect, but it's possible to integrate with a bit of legwork with scripts and the like.

That way you can import from your browser/extension of choice, save it in a form (.md? .odt/docx?) of choice, and export it as you please (ppts or pdfs? webpages?).

While I haven’t had a need to use it, this sounds like what Ulysses[0] was built for. I saw a writer talking about it years ago, and how they liked it because it allowed them to organize and keep their research right alongside their document in the same app.

[0] https://ulysses.app

Check out thinky.dev - it is primarily focused on 2 right now, but I think it is really good at it.

It was also built because of academia, my masters thesis

This sort of flow works well for me with obsidian+paperpile+latex

I am using Scrivener right now, since it’s superlocal and interfaces well enough with other apps.