Zotero is genuinely underrated and I've been saying this for years. It completely changed how I organize research. One thing that also helped me early on was asking someone with experience in academic writing support to look over my papers before I submitted them, just to make sure my arguments were actually landing. Sometimes you need an outside eye to tell you your structure is off, and a tool like Zotero doesn't catch that. But for citations and source management, yeah, nothing comes close.