Discovering new ideas means discovering novel connections. When your academic notes represent different topics, the links between them are the connections waiting to be discovered. However, that doesn’t happen on its own. You need a way to display relevant connections when browsing your notes. It is a bit like when you browse an Amazon product and the platform suggests 25 related products to help you find what you need. In this blog post, we’re going to look at an elegant, compelling way to surface creative connections in Obsidian, to come up with better research ideas.
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Creativity comes from seeing connections where others miss them.
In your digital note-taking vault, this simply means discovering relevant links. However, it is not very easy to discover links when there are tens of thousands of links around. Here is a visualisation of all the links in my PhD vault built over three years. Can you see anything useful?
In my opinion, this is an overwhelming number of notes and connections that do not help me discover new ideas. This is why we have to zoom in on each node and discover the nodes in its vicinity. Connections are mostly relevant between related topics, our link structure therefore has to surface related topics. My personal way of structuring this relation is through identifying four kinds of notes:
- Links: All notes that link out are related to concepts. In the note for “climate change”, I can link to the sub-topic of “global warming”, for instance.
- Backlinks: This is just a note, but assuming the opposite direction. So the linke from “climate change” to “global warming” will be a backlink in the “global warming” note and a regular link in the “climate change” note.
- Parent Links: Sometimes a note is part of a bigger group of very closely related sibling notes. For instance, “red”, “green”, and “blue” are sibling concepts with the parent being “colour”. Knowing the parent of a note can help you quickly discover the entire family of notes surrounding a specific topic.
- Related Links: A related link could also be called a lazy link. For instance, if a note “X” is mentioned in three different papers. I might link those three papers as related to “X”, without bothering to note exactly what they say about X.
Here is a schematic of these different link types. None of the nodes above the currently open note are easily accessible. This is precisely what we will solve in this post.
This is incredibly useful as it gives you a very broad overview of everything that is intimately related to the currently open note. Of course, you could think of linking far more notes that are farther away, but you would quickly run into the scenario of being overwhelmed by too many links, like in the graph view screenshot.
I found that this structure is very practical and usually results in surfacing only 5 to 10 nodes, making it much easier to discover missing connections! Let’s implement that.
Why is Obsidian the best choice for academic note-taking?
Obsidian has several advantages over other tools like Notion. It is local and fast, it can handle PDFs and annotations and it is expandable through thousands of plugins, allowing you to find the workflow for your research. Here are ten more reasons to use Obsidian for your academic journey. Click on the button below to join the free digital note-taking course where I will explain precisely why and how to use Obsidian for research:
Using Obsidian Bases for navigation
If you are unfamiliar with Obsidian bases, please check the Deep Dive on Bases I published a few months ago. To recap: an Obsidian base is a table akin to Notion’s databases, but it has the advantage of being context-aware. That means if you’re looking at a note X, you can find all notes related to X using this base. If you’re looking at a note Z instead, the same base will display notes related to Z. This means if you have created a base once, you can reuse it in every note without any modifications. Here is how the structure above looks in my “BacklinkBase”:
To make this work, your nodes need to have a specific structure.
Step 1: Adding parent and related notes properties to your notes
This is the only step that you need to do manually. Add a parent property to your notes, which is just a single link, and a related property, which is a list of links. You can click on the little symbol next to the property name to change the type from link to list:
I add these two properties to all of my notes within a template. Every single note that is created will always have these properties. However, for the majority of notes, they might just be empty. And that doesn’t hurt. A good practice is to revisit your notes and sometimes add new related links to help build more links over time.
Step 2: Building the Navigation Base in Obsidian
Now you are ready to create the foundation to help discover backlinks. And this is very simple, too:
- Hit Ctrl/Command + P and select the option “Bases: Create new Base”.
- Configure this base with just one filter: “file.hasLink(this file)”. This will automatically display all files that link to the currently viewed file.
- Check the properties “parent” and “related” to be displayed. Or any other properties you would like to see.
- Embed this base into any note by using
![[BacklinkBase.base]](If you named your base file “BacklinkBase”)
Here is how it looks in Obsidian:
Step 3: Add this base to the template for all of your notes
Finally, just add the properties in the BacklinkBase to a stub template that you can use for all newly created notes. This ensures that you never forget to add the properties.
From now on, discovery will become very easy!
Step 4: Extending your Backlink Base
You might have noticed that we are only accessing the related and parent links of the backlinks to this note, not the forward links. However, you don’t have to be limited to this, and you can also include the same for the forward links of this note. Here is a conceptual diagram:
This will give you far more results in your navigation base, and even too many to be useful. This depends on your use case and note. Therefore, you might want to create two views: One that includes both parts of the diagram and one that only includes the upper part of the diagram. All you need to change is the filter as described in the picture above. Adding multiple views to your navigation base will enable you to switch it individually depending on the note.
Step 5: Embed the navigation base in the sidebar
In this example, I embedded the base directly at the top of the file. However, you also have the option to embed it into the sidebar. Simply drag and drop the BacklinkBase file into the sidebar to have it displayed there permanently:
The advantage of this method is that you will get the BacklinkBase in every note, even in those that do not already have it. The disadvantage, however, is that if you open the node in a new window, that window will not have a sidebar, and you will not be able to see the navigation. So if you always work in one window in Obsidian, that is a viable option. Prefer to have multiple windows, then embed the base at the top of the file instead.
Using Obsidian’s Bases to discover new connections
The power of this method is hard to convey, but I have tried to record a video to show you how quickly I can navigate to papers related to concepts and find topics near the note I’m browsing. Remember that whenever you hold the Command key and hover a link in Obsidian, it will open a small window with the contents of the note. Suppose you want a little bit more convenience. In that case, there is a plugin called “Hover Editor”, which allows you to open multiple nodes, pin them to the screen, and generally has more functionality than Obsidian out of the box.
This video shows:
- I start exploring a topic called “Partial Dependence Plots” (which is a method that explains what a machine learning model does)
- I discovered a paper talking about that and using this method (Velazco 2024) and looked at the PDF.
- Then I discovered a related concept, “Model Extrapolation”, which is more distantly related to partial dependence plots.
- From there, I find all the papers on that topic again.
- And finally, I discovered notes on my own project where I used this partial dependence plot method.
All of that takes just about 30 seconds. Navigating through related concepts, your own results, and papers in that manner makes it extremely powerful in tying information that is loosely related but not necessarily linked in your vault.
What is the point of Obsidian bases?
The typical use case for Obsidian Bases is to display related concepts in a table, for example, all the books you have read and some information about them. They are replacing the much-dreaded DataView plugin. However, if you think a little bit out of the box, you can find many more use cases rather than just information tables. For example, you can organise your project to-dos in a base, assigning statuses to them and tracking the progress – here is an example in my current paper:
While that is useful, I think this is the simplest of all use cases, and because Bases are context-aware, you can create elaborate navigation structures that will help you with your creativity and discovery.
Take a look at the in-depth tutorial of Obsidian’s basics to learn more about how to do all of that:
Bases can also display your results as cards. As long as you include an image in the properties, you can create beautiful lists of, for instance, academic results. Here’s how it looks:
Screenshot
How to create novel research ideas?
A novel research idea is something that you have to find.
If you have ever foraged for mushrooms in the forest or seashells on the beach, you know that there is no real secret to finding things, but your best bet is to look in the right places. In this example, the right place is the neighbourhood of your note linked through parent links, related links, or backlinks. Our Obsidian setup helped make this network accessible through one succinct and simple base/table.
Your job, as someone looking for ideas, is now to effortlessly take a stroll through your notes, which are hopefully well-linked, and discover the connections they bring!
Good luck with your research, and check out the note-taking course and the knowledge management course for more strategies on how to organise and structure your research notes.