A Template for Academic Obsidian Use
I’ve been using Obsidian for 5 years now (early adopter!) for academic research, and have tweaked and simplified my setup to the core ingredients needed. This demo vault provides all plugins and functionality I rely on, on a daily basis; little more is needed. It’s 95% core Obsidian!
The philosophy behind my approach comes from the idea of knowledge graphs. Notes are quite structured and atomic to prevent duplication and to optimize for retrieval. However, I also did my best to minimize the overhead for adding this structure.
If you want to learn about this approach, please read the accompanying blog post at https://www.emilevankrieken.com/blog/2025/academic-obsidian/.
Installing this template Well, that couldn’t be easier! Just download/clone this repo, and open Obsidian on this folder. Merging it with your active setup is a lot trickier though. You’d need to compare in particular the active plugins and appearance snippets.
Link Colours
Supercharged Links colours note links by type:
| Colour | Note type | Tag |
|---|---|---|
| Blue | Papers | #source/paper |
| Green | Concepts & Methods | #concept, #method |
| Orange | Topics | #topic |
| Teal | Projects | #project |
| Purple | Venues & Conferences | #venue |
| Black | Authors & Institutions | #author, #institution |
Paper links also show the venue and year as a suffix, e.g. (NeurIPS 2024).