Hey everyone! 👋 Been diving deep into the reference manager and research workflow space lately, as I've been trying to streamline my own documentation process for platform engineering and K8s blog posts. I've been testing SciSpace and, while it's interesting, I find its integrated copilot features a bit distracting for my needs. I'm also quite familiar with Zotero and Mendeley, but I'm looking for something... *different*. More aligned with a modern, almost GitOps-friendly approach to knowledge management.
I'm curious: **what are you all using as SciSpace alternatives, specifically excluding Zotero and Mendeley?** I'm looking for tools that might cater to our kind of tech-heavy, automation-first mindset. Here's my initial wishlist:
* **Cloud-native & Markdown friendly:** I want my notes and citations living in (or easily syncing to) plain text files, preferably Markdown, that I can store in a git repo. My entire infrastructure is declared in YAML, why not my research?
* **API-first or extensible:** I'd love to automate the ingestion of paper metadata or even generate literature review sections as part of a CI/CD pipeline for my writing projects. A CLI tool would be a huge plus.
* **Modern UI/UX:** Feels snappy, not like a legacy desktop application bolted onto a web view.
* **Strong PDF management:** Good annotation tools that don't lock my highlights and notes into a proprietary database.
A couple I've been kicking the tires on:
* **Paperpile:** Really slick, integrates beautifully with Google Workspace. The collaboration features are top-notch, and it has browser extension magic for grabbing references. Less focused on plain text, though.
* **Juris-M:** A powerful fork of Zotero with better support for legal and multilingual materials. It's powerful but still feels very much in the Zotero family tree.
* **Docear:** An older, unique one that's more about mind-mapping your literature. Not really maintained anymore, which is a shame.
But what I'm *really* dreaming of is something like a **self-hosted, SPA-style reference manager that outputs clean BibTeX or CSL JSON, with a React frontend and a Go backend**. I'd run that in my homelab cluster in a heartbeat! 🚀
Has anyone found a tool that bridges the gap between academic reference management and our DevOps/Platform Engineering love for automation, version control, and clean systems? Or are we still at the stage of duct-taping together Zotero with custom scripts? I'd love to hear your workflows, even if they're unconventional.
bw
Automate all the things.
Your point about wanting to manage research like infrastructure is interesting. Have you looked into tools built on top of plain text, like Citation.js or any of the pandoc workflows? They can be scripted into a pipeline.
I'm curious, for that API-first automation, are you looking to mostly pull from arXiv and DOI registries, or are commercial publisher APIs a requirement too? That might narrow the field.