I’d like to be able to cite a Zotero entry so that:
(Author, year) (or any other citation style I’d choose) would appear at the cursor…
so that the thing in parentheses would be a link to that Zotero entry;
full bibliographical entry would appear at the bottom of the note…
… where, ideally, a ‘References’ list would be alphabetically sorted and updated as I cite things in the body of the note.
Currently I’m able to achieve 1. and 3. by to separate Cite commands of the Zotero Integration Plugin: I have two ‘citation formats’, one is a ‘Formatted Citation’, the other is ‘Formatted Bibliography’. But for the latter to appear where I need it, I need to place it there manually. And even though in Zotero Export options I told it to ‘Include Zotero Links’, what gets added to my note by ‘Formatted Citation’ is just pure text.
Given that the world of plugins seems to be fluid, and online I can see a variety of outdated suggestions: what is the best way to approach this issue in May 2025? I’d be willing to try some Pandoc + Citations combination, if you guys tell me it’s the way to go. (As a newbie I’m hesitant to attempt this myself.) Or is there some other option I’m not aware of? (Could this be done just using the Zotero Integration plugin?)
Don’t worry, you don’t necessarily need Pandoc, even though it’s in the name.
Using Pandoc Reference List, you’ll:
Insert citations in the form of citekeys (e.g. [@smith.etal2018] for a parenthetical citation), and Pandoc Reference List will render this as a fully formatted citation in the citation style you choose in the settings (e.g. (Smith et al. 2018) for APA).
When you hover over the rendered citekey, there are buttons that let you select the item in Zotero, or open the PDF in Zotero:
For now, you can copy-paste the bibliography from the sidebar into the note, when you’re finished writing, or let Pandoc create the bibliography automatically, if you export using Pandoc.
This is the case with the Pandoc Reference List.
The good thing about this workflow is that you get formatted citations in Obsidian, and you can export the document via Pandoc, and the underlying citekeys will work with its citeproc engine as usual. You can even get the rendered citations included in the standard PDF export provided by Obsidian.
Thank you very much for taking the time to reply! It seems to be a very nice suggestion (and I’d used Pandoc for various purposes, I just wanted to keep my Obsidian install as thin as possible). I will investigate. Thank you again!
@Feralflora, thank you, this indeed seems to be working nicely! I have one question regarding the Pandoc .odt export – perhaps you’ll know the answer? All my APA-formatted (Author, year) citations get exported as [@citationkey] strings. I seem unable to find an option which would tell Pandoc to use, for the export, the citation text as provided by Pandoc Reference List?
There’s two ways to go about this. Either you use the built-in citeproc (citation processing) provided by Pandoc by supplying the necessary arguments: --citeproc, --bibliography and --csl (citation style language). This will convert your citekeys into properly formatted citations in plain text, according to the style language you specified.
Or - and this is what I recommend - you can use a filter provided by the maintainer of the Better Bibtex to convert the citekeys into formatted and editable citations in your ODT document.
