For academic writing, it would be great to easily refers to papers on preprint servers (such as arxiv) or published (using DOI). When writing notes on projects, there can be a lot of citations, so having shortcuts would be very useful to reduce typing and avoiding cluttering the markdown source.
For preprint servers, the simplest solution would be to create automatically a link when recognizing the server name followed by a preprint ID, for example: arxiv:hep-th/9206084. This is the customary way of sharing papers in theoretical physics for example (so copying information from an email would directly create all necessary links). One could even remove arxiv: in the preview. A DOI can be linked using the prefix doi: and the address http://dx.doi.org/.
More generally, users could provide pairs of name and URL, such that name:ID maps to url/ID.
Yes! In the future you could think of a browser plugin that would automatically create an obsidian note for each preprint, containing the doi, link and abstract.
In fact after thinking a bit more, the best would be to have a plugin in Zotero (or any other bibliography management software) which uses Obsidian as a backend for its notes. Then the notes could be displayed both in Obsidian to be reused by other notes, but also be associated to the PDF.
I am thinking of building a new bibliography management software, I would definitely include this if I do.
it would be really helpful to be able to generate a full template note starting only from an arxiv link i.e. building up templates that retrieve all the article metadata directly from arxiv and fill up the info on my newly generated note.
This would really unlock obsidian’s potential in literature research in terms of ease of use.