File notes ordered by number of backlinks

[jcarlos]

Hi all,
I am very new to Obsidian so probably there is an easy way to do what I am looking for but I am not able to find it sorry.
I am doing a literature review with obsidan and I got a lot of file notes from my papers reading. Now I need to go through them and I would like to get them ordered by the number of backlinks they have, meaning that the ones that have more backlinks are the ones “more popular” in the papers. Is there any way to get the notes ordered in such way? I only see that the notes can be ordered by file name, modified time or created time.
I know I can go note by note and checking the backlink counter at the bottom of the screen but that takes time when you have a lot of notes. I know it can also be seen from the graph view, the bigger the node the more backlinks it has, but again I need to click on each node to read the backlinks count, one by one.
I heard also about Dataview plug-in but not tested, is that something Dataview can do? Can it tell me what notes are the ones that have more backlinks in a quick query?
Thanks,

[mnvwvnm]

Hi,
by your name, do you speak portuguese?
For me it’s more ‘easy’ to explain the solution in my native language.
(and yes, it’s possible to do that with the plugin Dataview)

[mnvwvnm]

I’ll try to explain this in english.
So, basically you need to create a table with all the file notes sorted according to the number of backlinks in each file.
First, you need to install the plugin Dataview.
Dataview works with ‘metadata’ information: data that you can insert in each file (via frontmatter or inline fiels) or ‘implicit’ data (metadata automatically created by each file, like file name, created date, tags, etc.).
Your notes files have at least the implicit data. And that is enough for yours intents.
In this case, you need to use the metadata file.inlinks (the backlinks) or file.outlinks (the outgoing links).
You need to create a query like this:

```dataview
TABLE file.inlinks as Backlinks, length(file.inlinks) as Total
FROM "yourfolderinObsidian"
SORT length(file.inlinks) DESC

Explaining:

• file.inlinks gives you the list/name of all the backlinks. It’s optional. Backlinks it’s the name you chose for the table column.
• length(file.inlinks) returns the number of backlinks. Total it’s the name you chose for the column…
• "yourfolderinObsidian" it’s the name of the folder where are your notes. If you want the query for all your vault you can use "". (you need to read the plugin documentation to find other options for FROM)
• SORT length(file.inlinks) DESC sorts all results by the number of file.inlinks in DESCending order.

Final note: I didn’t test the plugin for incoming and outgoing links… as such I don’t know the accuracy of the plugin for this type of metadata and its variants (aliases, blocks, headers, etc.)

[jcarlos]

Works like a charm, thanks a lot!