I really like the Storymaps platform and would enjoy to present some of my research with a Story Map. And I am certainly not the only one, see Dawn Wright's summary https://community.esri.com/groups/story-maps-for-education/blog/2018/10/07/speaking-the-language-of-...
However, to make Story Maps useful for an academic context there are a few challenges. Some of them are already addressed by others.
For example, there has been some discussion a few years ago about creating a peer-reviewed Story Map Journal, see e.g. Toward a Peer-Reviewed Story Maps Academic Journal | Session Gallery | AAG Annual Meeting 2018 and I do have some recollection of a session at the UC2018 on the same topic. Furthermore, some ideas have been shared about Making Story Maps Citable (e.g., with Digital Object Identifiers). Others have raised issues about persistency, offline availability and self-hosting of Story maps.
Besides addressing these issues adding reference manager support (i.e. Zotero) would add functionality necessary for making the Story Maps Platform useful in an academic environment. I advocate an implementation like Zotpress which brings your personal or group Zotero Library to WordPress for easy citation and bibliographic referencing.
A Zotero Story Maps 'plugin' would be a great asset.
