New plugin: Citations (with Zotero)

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21

Thanks for building the plugin. A couple of questions/suggestions.

  • Is there a way to have the user define the hotkey for the citations, like how you can reassign other Obsidian shortcuts?
  • Is there a way to pick a file in the user’s vault to set as the template for references instead of adding text to a box in setttings?
22

I just released version 0.3.0 with a few new features and bugfixes.

New features:

  • “Open literature note” modal now supports new actions: pressing Tab will open the corresponding reference in Zotero; pressing Ctrl+Enter will open the note in a new pane
  • Template variables containerTitle (journal name for a paper; book for a book chapter), abstract, URL, zoteroSelectURI, and more now available. See the plugin’s settings tab for documentation.
  • Provide a notification when the citation library cannot be loaded.

Other changes:

  • Various improvements to the plugin setting tab.
  • Avoid crashing when opening references with missing publication dates.
  • Avoid crashing when creating literature notes whose titles contain disallowed characters. (These characters are now replaced with underscores.)
2 Likes
23

@phlind, thanks for the suggestion – I’ve added the Pandoc format citation to the to-do list.

@mfperdi, you can change the plugin’s hotkeys in the Obsidian “Hotkeys” settings tab. Search there for “citations”. I’ve added your second idea to the to-do list!

2 Likes
24

For some reason, the citation does not get inserted into an Obsidian note.

  1. The plugin is installed and connected to a bibliography file.
  2. I can open the search window and search citations.
  3. However, when I select a citation and hit Enter, the search window is closed, but nothing is inserted into the document.

(On Mac; the latest version of Obsidian)

25

Sorry — I did not see that this issue is already being discussed and added my own below.

26

Ok, creating a Literature Notes folder solved the issue, but… what if I do not want to have one? Nor need to have literature notes formatted like this? I simply want to be able to cite my literature.

Otherwise, great plugin — the citation plugin was the last thing missing. Thanks for doing this.

3 Likes
27
  • 1, I would also like to cite without creating notes somtimes
1 Like
28

Thanks for the great plugin. It works for me but doesn’t show the metadata in the preview mode. There is metadata info in the edit mode but it shows nothing in preview.
I disabled the css and the problem is still there.

29

You have to enable the “Show frontmatter” option in the Obisdian options under “Editor” for this to work.

1 Like
30

Thank you so much for the citation plugin!

I was using this but I would change the name to have the literature note title template that I want to use for my citations. Unfortunately, when I use Ctr-Shift-E the citation would be the original one @{{citekey}} instead of the name I changed it to and keep creating a new document with the previous name.

My note template is today’s date S-type of source-@{{citekey}}- shortened title

I do make an alias with @{{citekey}} though.

Is it possible to allow changing the title without creating the new document and use the name I changed it to when I use Ctr-Shift-E?

Thank you!

1 Like
31

Hi @Elin, thanks for trying it out! You can change the template for a literature note title in the plugin settings tab, though not all of the properties you mentioned are available at the moment. I’ll put them on the to-do list. (“type of source” can be read from the Zotero export, I believe, though the particular labels probably won’t match your existing set exactly.)

Unfortunately this is pretty far beyond the current powers of the plugin – we don’t keep track of citekey–note relations, beyond the configurable title mapping discussed above. It’d require quite a bit of extra infrastructure to get done, so I probably won’t pursue it unless there is considerable demand.

2 Likes
32

That’s ok, thanks for replying! I think I would keep 2 notes for each citation, one the normal bibliographic stuff and the notes that would be linked with the citation.

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33

One more question. I have my Obsidian vault on my iCloud to access my notes on Windows, Mac, and iOS/iPadOS. Is there a way to set the JSON file exported from Zotero to a relative path within the vault instead of an absolute one?

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34

@mfperdi This is a good idea and wouldn’t be too hard to implement – on the to-do list! :slight_smile:

1 Like
35

This is great! My current reading note title format is {{lastname}} {{year}} - {{shorttitle}}, which I do manually. Would be great if it were possible to make that from a template (and would be a good prod for me to get my Zotero library in order…).

4 Likes
36

I have the same request of @npseaver. {{authorString}} gives name and surname of the author, whereby it would be better to have in the note title template only surname/lastname.

5 Likes
37

BTW, would you consider adding support for bibTeX format? After all this is a more common bibliography format than cjson. Thank you!

5 Likes
38

BTW, would you consider adding support for bibTeX format? After all this is a more common bibliography format than cjson. Thank you!

+1 for this :slight_smile:

2 Likes
39

+1 for me.

2 Likes
40

@jgauthier, if I want to cite a page or a page-range from some book - where am I supposed to put this information when using the plugin?

1 Like