Use Cursor for academic paper writing with citations
Forum users write papers in markdown with Zotero citations and a bibtex file for Cursor to pick references from, converting to Word with pandoc.
Done withCursor
- What they did
- One user writes papers in markdown, inserts citations with the Zotero citation picker and Better BibTeX, and keeps a large bibtex file with abstracts so Cursor can suggest references. Pandoc converts the markdown to Word, and a Lua script turns the citations into native Zotero ones. The AI is used to rewrite, trim and add sentences.
- How it went
- The user paraphrases nearly every sentence because the AI isn't good enough for most academic writing. The workflow is only slightly faster, but the final quality is higher because revising is less painful. Cursor can't read PDFs.
- Worth knowing
- Cursor has no native PDF support. Workarounds are converting PDFs to markdown with Marker or Datalab, or having ChatGPT summarize key papers into .md files.
Try it yourself with Cursor
I am writing a paper on [topic] in markdown at [file path]. Use my bibtex file [path] to pick and insert citations in [citation style] where my claims need support, and flag any claim that has no matching reference. Then check that the document converts to Word with pandoc. Finish when the paper builds cleanly, and do not invent references that are not in my bibtex file.
Source: forum.cursor.com · Undated
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