What I did in week 3 of my PhD
This week, I’ve been focusing very heavily on reading and reviewing literature. Mostly to work with my supervisor to write a short paper about some work we have previously done. This was on a pretty tight deadline for submission, so hopefully it goes well.
To do the referencing for reports, I use a tool called Zotero, which I would highly recommend over other common tools like Endnote, as Zotero is open source.
Writing this paper also makes a lot of use of LaTeX. LaTeX is a great tool to write papers with, but oh my word is it difficult to get set up. No one-click install for that. Thankfully, I eventually got it installed, and found an extension for VS Code that works very well.
You seem to face the PhD head-on!
I only had a brief look Zotero. It seemed quite powerful. Not as versatile as jabref, but more user-friendly and stable. We tried to use jabref because of the shared database (self-hosted), automated meta-data, …
Overleaf might be a big help for you. It is an online latex platform, enabling you to collaborate (and all on the same latex version, …) easily. Most of the additional latex libraries are included by default. It is not perfect (Overleaf can be a bit slow in rendering the document for example), but it prevented that I had to install and configure a full latex environment on the pc’s of all my colleagues and supervisors.
Good luck with the paper!
I’ll have to check overleaf out, it sounds interesting.