I tried Zotero and equivalent softwares (mendeley) a few times but never caught.

My typical workflow involves a big gdoc that I can share with my advisor. I paste the title, year, author and number of citations (to know which articles are the most influential). And, most importantly, a link to the pdf (sometimes through sci-hub).

Then I write notes under those articles, pasting screenshots of equations that I want to find easily.

When I have to write my paper, and this is the only painpoint, I have to paste the titles to google scholar and copy the bibtex code. I might write a simple bot at some point to do it for myself.

I'm taking every advice to improve this!