I've been using SciSpace for about six months to manage research notes and citations. The features are impressive on paper—AI summaries, citation extraction, the whole thing.
But last month, I realized I was spending more time organizing the tool itself than my actual work. I was anxious about categorizing things "correctly" in their system, and the constant updates kept moving things around.
I switched to a folder of plain text files with a simple naming convention. One file per paper, a few keywords at the top, my notes below. For invoicing and expenses, I use a similar principle—a simple spreadsheet is often clearer than an over-engineered system.
The relief was immediate. I'm just writing notes now, not managing software. Has anyone else found that simpler tools reduce friction for actual work? I'm curious, especially from a compliance or bookkeeping perspective—when does a tool start creating more work than it saves?
I'm a business analyst at a 40-person consulting firm. We run a mix of Notion for general wikis and actual plain text/Markdown files in Obsidian for research-heavy project work, with QuickBooks for the books.
**Real monthly cost**: SciSpace's team plan started around $12/user/month for us, but the AI add-ons pushed it toward $20. Plain text files cost $0. That's the main thing.
**Deployment/integration effort**: Getting SciSpace configured with our Zotero libraries took our assistant about a week. Moving to Obsidian with a folder sync was an afternoon.
**Where it breaks**: SciSpace's AI features got confused with our niche industry papers, requiring manual correction on maybe 30% of auto-extracted citations. That's where the anxiety OP mentions comes from - you start doubting the tool.
**Compliance angle**: For bookkeeping, plain text and PDF invoices in a dated folder structure passed our last audit cleanly. The auditor said it was easier to follow than a dedicated app's proprietary database.
I'd recommend plain text for any focused, individual research or for invoice tracking in a small team. If you need to choose, tell us your team size and how many citations you handle monthly. Over 200 a month might need some structure, but maybe just a better simple tool like Obsidian.