Obsidian, out of the box, is just a text editor.

The real power is in the plugins.

After years of testing, here are the must-haves:

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Best Obsidian Plugins for Academics - The Effortless Academic

Source: https://effortlessacademic.com/best-obsidian-plugins-for-academics/?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=May Obsidian is a powerful note-taking software, but some of the best functionality comes from the selection of community plugins. Here are the best Obsidian plugins for academics who want to take notes and keep track of knowledge as efficiently as possible. Many of these plugins save time, let you integrate your notes with papers, help you navigate your knowledge and provide powerful customisations. After using Obsidian extensively and even building a course on productive academic note-taking using my custom system, I have found many of these plugins to be must-haves.

Learn the foundational systems researchers are rarely taught: from powerful note-taking and knowledge management methods to modern lit review tools, ethical AI and productive research workflows.

• Top Obsidian Plugins
• Calendar
• Callout Manager
• Citations
• cMenu
• Commander
• Custom Attachment Location
• Heading Level Indent
• Hover Editor
• Iconic
• PDF++
• Pretty Properties
• QuickAdd
• Recent Files
• Style Settings
• Supercharged Links
• Tasks
• ZotLit
• What are the best Obsidian plugins for academics?- Best Obsidian Plugins for Literature Review - Best Obsidian Plugins for Note-Taking, Linking and Navigating - Best Obsidian Plugins to Customise and Enhance your Vault
• Summary

Top Obsidian Plugins

These 17 Obsidian plugins are must-haves for any researcher seeking to manage their academic knowledge and conduct research efficiently with Obsidian. Although it takes a bit of an initial investment of time to get set up with these plugins, they genuinely can transform your workflow and save hours of work down the line. By better integrating your entire research process (discovery, analysis, information retrieval, etc.), you avoid tedious, repetitive tasks and spend time on what really matters: building new insights and truly pushing your research forward.

As with any Obsidian plugin, you can always disable plugins you don’t use or find not useful for your specific workflow.

## Calendar

TheObsidian Calendar Pluginadds a calendar view for your daily notes. You can see the full calendar at the top right of your Obsidian Vault, in the right sidebar. This can come in handy when keeping track of day-to-day activities and to make it easier to maintain a research log.

Many researchers rely on some kind of research log to keep track of work, but going back in time through these logs can be tedious, and they often are not linked to other notes or concepts in easy-to-access ways. In Obsidian, you can use the daily note as your ongoing research log, and link to files and other notes you contributed to that day within the note.

## Callout Manager

TheObsidian Callout Manager Pluginmakes inserting callouts much easier and allows you to customise their icons and colors.

To use it you can hit ctrl/cmd + P and type “Callout Manager: Edit Callout”. The resulting menu allows you to choose the callout you want to insert into the active note. You can additional notes within the callout, then click the arrow or outside the callout to insert it.

Callouts make a consistent, stylised input and come in handy when looking through notes later. It can make it easy to pick up on important points, warnings or other types of information you recorded. Below is a list of callouts pre-configured through the plugin. Callout Manager allows you to create any possible callout using 1000s of icons and colours and configure them to your liking.

Combined it with the cMenu plugin, to add a floating button at the bottom to add a callout with one click or use Commander to add a button to the top of the note.

Citations

You can use theObsidian Citations Pluginto easily import papers stored on your computer in a BibTeX file. If you use PaperPile as your reference manager this plugin is the best way to connect to Obsidian. If you are using Zotero instead, you don’t need this plugin at all. Instead, you’ll want to use the Zotlit plugin, which is much more powerful.

To set up the Citations plugin, you need to specify where the BibTeX file with your papers is stored on your computer (Remember: Paperpile stores all your references in one BibTeX file, which is synced into Google Drive). To do this, go to the Obsidian Settings and click “Citations” on the sidebar (under Community Plugins). Here, you can set the location of your citation library on your computer.

💡 Want to use Paperpile with Obsidian seamlessly? Check out my in-depthnote-taking coursewhere I go through this step-by-step.

ThecMenu Obsidian Plugindisplays a floating bar at the bottom of your Obsidian app that lets you easily add elements to your current note (e.g., footnotes, callouts, checkboxes or superscripts). This is especially useful if you’re still new to Obsidian, because some of these elements are normally quite hidden. cMenu makes it easy to see all the features available to you. You can also customise what is displayed in the menu and remove features you don’t use, adding features you use frequently in the plug-in settings.

An alternative to this plugin is the more popular “Editing Toolbar“, however cMenu is more lightweight and through its floating bar at the bottom unobstrusive.

Commander

TheCommander Obsidian Pluginallows you to add custom buttons to different sections of the Obsidian interface. This is an excellent plugin for customising your Obsidian UI, allowing you to work faster by instantly accessing features you rely on frequently. An alternative is to learn the hotkeys!

For example, at the top right of every note I have these additional buttons:

• Daily Note: Open previous day’s note
• Daily Note: Open next day’s note (Both great for navigating your calendar notes)
• Templates: Insert template
• Move current tab to new window (very useful to pop-out a canvas to full screen)
• Reveal in Finder (useful if you want to find a PDF you are reading in Obsidian)

The best thing about commander is that it is so easy to cusomise. Just hover left of the buttons and a small “+” appears allowing you to add additional commands here. This plugin is also compatible with commands from other plugins. For instance, you can easily have a button to “import a paper from Zotero” (which uses the Zotlit plugin).

Custom Attachment Location

TheCustom Attachment Location Obsidian Pluginis useful to ensure your project scales well, your Obsidian vault doesn’t slow down with too many images, and your files are kept track of in a consistent way. When you add images or PDFs by drag-and-dropping them or copying them, the plugin automatically:

1. Renames file according to the note they are added to.
2. Copies them into the attachments folder.
3. Converts PNGs to JPGs, which saves a lot of storage space and makes your vault faster.

This is not only important for structure, but also for functionality. Bases or Plugins might display files in your vault based on their location and if they accidentally end up in the wrong folder it would not work.

Heading Level Indent

TheHeading Level Indent Obsidian Plug-inimprove your Vault’s readability by indenting the text under headers. As notes develop more and more headers, it can quickly become difficult to navigate and find information. This simple header indentation makes it much easier to skim information, and customise it to your liking.

If you often experience eye strain or fatigue when interacting with your notes, this may be one small way to improve the layout to make it easier. After all, as researchers, we spenda lotof time in our Obsidian vaults, taking notes and distilling knowledge. It’s well worth it to make your Vault suit you perfectly!

To use this plugin, go to your Obsidian Settings and click “Heading Level Indent” in the list of Community Plugins. Here, you can adjust the indentation under each header. The smaller the heading the farther to the right the content is indented. You can customise the amount of indentation in the plugin settings.

Notice how indentation makes it easier to navigate in longer notes?

Hover Editor

TheHover Editor Obsidian Pluginupgrades the cmd/ctrl + hover experience. This may seem like a small upgrade, but it makes a big difference to how quickly you can interact with your notes. If you’ve been following my work, you’ll know how important it is to**link your knowledge.**The more you use Obsidian and link your notes, you’ll find it easier to keep track of information and generate new ideas. However,viewingthese linked ideas can be tedious and mentally fatiguing in the default Obsidian.

With this plugin, you can quickly see the full context behind any link or note. It also provides the essential feature of adjusting the window size. This is essential when reading longer notes or reviewing the details of something you’ve linked.

To use this plugin, hold the Cmd/Ctrl key andthenhover over any link in your Obsidian vault. You’ll see their information pop up in a full-blown “Editor” experience. This lets you:

1. Move the Hover Editor pop-up
2. Customise its size
3. Edit its content
4. Open multiple floating windows and pin them wherever you need in the UI.

This plugin makes reading complex documents far easier since you have a lightweight way of keeping necessary notes open.

Iconic

TheIconic Obsidian Pluginallows you to add custom icons to files and folders. If you enjoy how Notion and other note-taking softwares let you choose certain Emojis or images for folders and notes, you’ll really love this plugin. By adding special icons to files and folders, you can quickly see what type of note you are dealing with. As visual beings, we tend to react to and digest visual information much faster than textual. So, use these special icons to quickly distinguish note types and edit notes in your Vault more efficiently.

To use this plugin, click Ctrl/Cmd+P and type “Iconic: Open Rulebook”. You can click the gear icon (Settings) for any Rule to change how that page’s icon appears. You can edit colours as well as icons themselves, or upload images.

The result is the image below, where the side-bar shows notes and folders with their corresponding icons. This makes it easy to navigate notes and find what you’re looking for.

This plugin makes navigation far easier because you can use the icons as landmarks to find the right note among many open notes.

PDF++

ThePDF++ Obsidian Plugintransforms Obsidian into the most powerful PDF reader. It allows you to add annotations to PDFs and create deep-links to them. Although you can create deep-links in Obsidian without this plugin, the annotations are only possible with PDF++. In the future, this may change, since annotating PDFs is on the Obsidians roadmap and we may able to do this in the future without this plugin. Here is a detailed tutorial on how to use it:

PDF++ is a must-have plugins for academics because it allows your notes to refer to specific sentences inside a PDF rather than just the file itself.

Pretty Properties

ThePretty Properties Obsidian Pluginprovides special customisation features so you can do as the name suggests… make your Obsidian vault more pretty! You can use colored properties, add covers to your properties and format dates. This may be largely aesthetic, but these changes can also help reduce cognitive load when skimming through notes and metadata. Here is how a Cover property is rendered as an image for a note on a book:

To use Pretty Properties, simply install the plugin and access its settings in the Obsidian Settings under “Community Plugins”. Here, you’ll see settings for Banners, Icons, Covers, Tasks, Property Settings, Dates and Other.

QuickAdd

TheQuickAdd Obsidian Community Pluginallows you to create custom commands to add a new note and copy it into its appropriate folder with the right template. This makes it much easier to keep your notes tidy, since the formatting and templates are done automatically. A tidy vault iskeyto swift and easy information access. As researchers, we can easily end up with hundreds if not thousands of notes (even 10,000s eventually!). Using the correct templates automatically saves time down the line when we want to organise or access notes we took months or even years ago.

QuickAdd is a very powerful plugin that allows to create custom commands combining creating new files, adding content to them, copying content around and running any plugins. The easiest use-case however is to create files using a specific template in a specific folder.

I use the QuickAdd Plugin to replace the “new note” hotkey (Ctrl+N or Command+N) with a customised QuickAdd menu. After you pick which type of note to create, the plugin prompts you for a few more fields, like a title or URL of the website you’re capturing. This helps you keep your metadatas as complete as possible (your future self will thank you). Using this method I never have to think about which plugin to use for new files or which folder to copy it to.

QuickAdd requires some configuration to be useful, play around with it.

Recent Files

TheRecent Files Pluginis a handy navigation plugin that displays the files you recently opened and edited. This isveryuseful for deep work and to easily backtrack your steps. Use ctrl/cmd + P to open the command palette and type in “Recent files” after installing. This will open the recent files window and you can drag it to any part of the UI. Here is how it looks if located at the top left:

Notice how the colours configured for the different types of notes make navigation easier? (This is done with the Style Settings + Supercharged Links plugins, see below).

Style Settings

TheStyle Settings Obsidian Pluginis a multi-purpose plugin that works with other plugins and themes to allow you to customise the appearance of your vault. In particular, it works with the pluginSupercharged Linksthat displays links in a different colour depending on what type of node they link to.

If you are using a custom theme it will likely have its own tab in Style Settings allowing you to customise font colours, sizes and many other aspects of appearance.

Supercharged Links

TheSupercharged Links Pluginanalyses links and categorises them by a set of rules. As we write notes and collect information from a variety of sources, it’s easy to start losing track of where different sources come from. For example, as academics we may use academic papers, YouTube video lectures, PDFs, and a variety of other information sources in our notes. This plugin categorises the different kinds of links based on a folder the note is located on, or a property/tag it has. You will need theStyle Settings Pluginto make this plugin work. The different colours notes have, greatly enhances navigation and comprehension of your notes. I love this plugin so much that I created a dedicated tutorial on how to use it:

More than colors you can also automatically add emojis before or after the link text.

Tasks

Obsidian allows you to add checkboxes to your notes, and in theory could be used as a todo-list. However remembering the files where these checkboxes are stored is difficult and adding due-dates or priorities is complicated. TheTasks Obsidian Pluginsolves this issue by allowing you to pull tasks across your entire vault into a single note. This requires some minimal coding but the learning curve is reasonable for the basic usecases. This plugin brings Obsidian on the same level as many other note-taking apps like Notion, EverNote, or Google Keep, with the simple, useful feature of to-do lists.

Even better than other note-taking apps, is that the Tasks plugin helps you to keep track of many different lists throughout your notes. In a place like Notion, you may create various lists in different places and lose track of them. Tasks pulls all of these checkboxes across your Vault together and creates one collected to-do list sorted and grouped to your liking.

Here is how to use this plugin to organise academic projects:

ZotLit

ZotLitis one of the best Obsidian plugins to integrate Zotero into Obsidian. This is a must-have for academics who use Obsidian and Zotero. This plugin accesses the Zotero database directly (unlike the more popular Zotero Integration plugin), making it extremely fast to import papers from Zotero. It even comes with aZotero pluginthat allows you to export papers from Zotero to Obsidian in bulk.

This is critical when we go from notes to writing academic manuscripts. Losing track of references because they are disconnected from our notes is a common problem.

It’s very easy to pull in sources via ZotLit into Obsidian, to do so:

1. Use the Cmd+P shortcut on Obsidian and search for “ZotLit”
2. Select “ZotLit: Open quick switcher for literature notes” to bring in a referene and its metadata from Zotero into Obsidian.
3. Search for the reference by author or title, and select from the drop down
4. Added! If you’ve set up ZotLit correctly, you will get an automatic source file created in Obsidian with all the metadata properties completed according to the paper’s metadata.

See the video below on how to easily add a new source to Obsidian from your Zotero collection using the ZotLit plugin. Below, we use a shortcut set up withCommanderto add a Zotlit icon to the left sidebar (ribbon bar).

Setting up Zotlit like in this video is a little bit challenging as you need to configure the templates to work with your format.

## What are the best Obsidian plugins for academics?

We’ve looked at the best Obsidian plugins for researchers in this article that make it easier to navigate, customise and get the most out of your Obsidian vault. Here’s a summary of the best Obsidian plugins for academics, based on different parts of the research workflow and how they fit in.

Best Obsidian Plugins for Literature Review

• ZotLit: Easily access papers from your Zotero collection(s) in Obsidian, and keep your workflow fully integrated.
• PDF++: Transform Obsidian into the best PDF reader and annotator tool, so you can easily read academic papers you find and takes notes on PDFs within your Vault.
• Citations: Easily access any articles you’ve saved on your desktop (via BibTeX) regardless of which reference manager you use. If you don’t use Zotero, this may be a great option. Otherwise, use ZotLit.

Best Obsidian Plugins for Note-Taking, Linking and Navigating

• Supercharged Links: Automatically keep track of where your sources come from and customise the links
• QuickAdd: Easily create new notes with preset templates to keep your notes more organised.
• Hover Editor: Navigate your notes more easily by seeing the full context behind links. Remember, linking your knowledge is the key to generating new ideas!
• Commander: Add custom buttons to your notes to easily access features you use frequently. Easier to access means easier to navigate, and more productive note-taking sessions.
• cMenu: The perfect plugin for beginners still learning how to navigate in Obsidian. Don’t worry about remembering hot keys, and just click on any option you need in the floating bar at the bottom.

Best Obsidian Plugins to Customise and Enhance your Vault

• Pretty Properties: Customise the properties and metadata of your notes to make it easier to skim information and reduce cognitive load.
• Iconic: Use custom icons or images for folders and notes to bring your Vault to life visually. This is similar to how Notion lets you add Emojis to notes and folders.
• Heading Level Indent: Make headers throughout your vault indent, so it’s easier to skim notes. Great to reduce cognitive strain when reading.

Summary

If there’s one lesson I hope researchers gain from using tools like Obsidian, it’s this: mastery of one tool is better than basic knowledge of a few. By diving deep into Obsidian and building a Vault that suits you perfectly, you’re future-proofing your workflow and saving countless hours down the line. Moreover, you’re ensuring your future self willthank youfor keeping track of your knowledge in a way that makes it accessible, understandable and useful.

The plugins here are one step towards mastering Obsidian for academic knowledge management and building a**system that works for you.**If you’re still learning the ropes, I highly suggest takingmy free note-taking coursewhere I walk you through the essentials of better knowledge management with Obsidian. It’s never too late to start building a better system!