I got so annoyed fighting with LaTeX and references that I built an open-source toolkit to automate the research paper workflow. Hope it saves someone a weekend.
Hey everyone,
Like a lot of you, I realized I was spending 20% of my time actually doing research and 80% of my time fighting with LaTeX errors, managing .bib files, tracking down lost citations, and trying to format my drafts.
Over time, I started building workflows to automate and streamline every single phase of the process. It eventually turned into a massive personal library of 40+ specific skills, scripts, and workflows covering the entire research paper lifecycle.
I just made the whole GitHub repository public so anyone can use it.
Here is the repo: https://github.com/ShaishavMaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills
It covers 40+ areas, but the main highlights include:
- The Setup: Clean, pre-configured directory structures so you never have to set up a
refs.bib, figure folder, or main.texfile from scratch again. - The Execution: Automation scripts and workflows for literature reviews, gathering citation metadata, and structuring your drafts.
- The Formatting (No more LaTeX crashes): GitHub Actions that automatically compile your files into a clean PDF every single time you push a commit.
I built this to solve my own headaches, but figured there are probably a lot of people stuck inside writing papers this weekend who could use a cheat code.
It is completely free and open-source. Feel free to use it for your next paper, fork it, or modify it for your specific field. If you think I missed a skill or have ideas for what I should add next, let me know in the comments or drop an issue in the repo!
Back to writing.
Thanks