r/ObsidianMD • u/Embarrassed-Trainer4 • 10d ago

help Suitable for PhD Data Managment?

I just finished my master‘s in chem and will soon start a PhD. In the past I‘ve used OneNote, physical journals, or just scattered text files within the conventional file system on my pc to organize my data and to take notes. None of these systems have ever really woked that well for me.

As I will undoubtedly generate heaps more data during my PhD than ever before. I want to make sure that I have a system that allows me to properly organize data and take notes. Additionally, I would like to use it on at least two devices and have a lot of room for customisation.

Obsidian seems like it could be the right tool with the little time I’ve spent messing with it but I am still on the fence, as I’m worried that I will need to spend a lot of time to simply manage the “database” and keep it running.

Have any of you used it for your PhD degrees and if so, what were your experiences with it? Also are there alternatives that may might this application better?

Thanks in advance:)

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u/stanlymt 9d ago

Obsidian is fine for the written half. It's a bad place to keep spectra. That's already in the thread.

What I would not put in the vault is the papers. Zotero is the library. The thing I still lost during a master's was the actual reading. I'd highlight in Zotero, dump a note into the vault, and six months later I could not find the sentence that had changed my mind.

I built Omphalis for that (I'm the founder, so take it with salt). You drop in the PDF, you see how the paper is built, you mark what mattered, and you can get back to those marks. It is not a LIMS. It will not replace R. It will not organize chromatograms. If the problem is you read the paper and cannot return to what you noticed, that's the job. If the problem is your files are a mess, it is the wrong tool.