{"id":1001,"date":"2026-11-09T09:15:00","date_gmt":"2026-11-09T14:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/?p=1001"},"modified":"2026-11-02T12:05:39","modified_gmt":"2026-11-02T17:05:39","slug":"one-way-that-im-using-claude","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/blog\/2026\/11\/09\/one-way-that-im-using-claude\/","title":{"rendered":"One way that I\u2019m using Claude"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Like many people, I often ask Claude or ChatGPT a simple question that I might once have investigated using a search engine. That\u2019s useful, but not particularly creative. For the past month or month and a half, though, I\u2019ve been using Claude in a way that some of you might find useful.1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I use Endnote<\/a> as my bibliography manager,2<\/a><\/sup> and I use Obsidian<\/a> to manage a large collection of markdown notes. Here\u2019s how I use Claude to link the two of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  1. Export all references in the Endnote database to a text file using the BibTeX export format. That retains all of the bibliographic information. It also includes the abstract for any references that has one.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. The first time through I prompted Claude to scan the BibTeX export and (a) retain only those records that include an abstract and (b) write each BibTeX record to a file with a name based on the citation within my Obsidian vault.3<\/a><\/sup> Now I prompt Claude to scan the BibTeX export and (a) retain only those records that include an abstract and that haven\u2019t already been added to my Obsidian vault and (b) write the new records to the vault, adding a letter to the year for disambiguation where necessary.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    Now I have a bunch of bibliographic records where I can easily search abstracts as well as authors and titles. More importantly (for me), when I open a specific record, theSmart Connections<\/a>community plugin shows me notes in my Obsidian vault that are similar to the one I\u2019m looking at with a numerical score that depends on the degree of relationship. The image below is a screenshot of what this looks like for a paper by Daniel Schreider<\/a> that recently appeared in Genetics<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
    <\/div>\n\n\n\n
      \n
    1. <\/a>Assuming that there is a \u201csome of you\u201d who read entries here. ↩<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n
    2. <\/a>Yes, I know that Clarivate is evil, but I\u2019ve been using EndNote for at least 20 years, maybe 30. Old habits die hard, and I\u2019m sure you could mimic everything I describe here in your bibliography manager. And in case you\u2019re wondering, I Clarivate won\u2019t pay me for mentioning Endnote, and I won\u2019t get any money from them if you click on that link and decide to buy it. ↩<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n
    3. <\/a>I use <author>-<year>-<source>. ↩<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Like many people, I often ask Claude or ChatGPT a simple question that I might once have investigated using a search engine. That\u2019s useful, but not particularly creative. For the… Read more ><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-productivity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1001"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1008,"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001\/revisions\/1008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}