That's interesting: I would have assumed academics would be less inclined to use tools like PowerPoint, but I guess I'm mistaken! It really goes to show how ubiquitous it is as a tool for thought. Do you mind if I ask what the context around those interviews was?

At the time we were considering writing some citation manager software and wanted to verify that other people had the same problems with the integration between Zotero and everything else.

I'd caution you to draw conclusions about academics! One reason we did not actually write the software was because we found academics to be high variance in their preferences.

The few people who used powerpoint for thinking would rather write out 20-30 citations by hand before touching Zotero. Someone else had a setup where one click would send articles from Chrome -> Zotero -> bib export -> Emacs org-mode + org-ref + org-roam