Separating notes with folders so that they don't link to one another?

I’m new to Obsidian. I am trying to set up folders for each clinical trial I am working on, each with a summary page within them that branches out to other pages (eg. Inclusion & Exclusion Criteria, Risk Assessment and so on). This has worked great for a single study, but now I’m adding other studies they are linking between folders, for example “Risk Assessment” in one study is linking to the Risk Assessment page in the folder for the other study.

Is there a way to separate this so they don’t connect between folders, without having entirely separate vaults?

Ultimately I want lots of separate stars on the graph view floating independently, one for each study.

This doesn’t firewall the links, but it might help to switch to:

Settings > Files and links > New link format > Relative path to file.

Or choose Absolute path in vault if you prefer.

That can help with both immediately seeing whether you’ve linked to the intended note and preserving the link if you ever move, rename, or delete notes or folders.

I recommend using unique note names instead of reusing them. In principle folders should be enough to distinguish, but in my experience most apps don’t take as much advantage of them for that as they could.

Some possible approaches for Trial A:

  • Trial A Recommendations
  • Recommendations (Trial A)
  • Assign a number or other short identifier to each trial and affix it to the file names: 25039.Trial A, 25039.Recommendations (it sounds like you have a standard set of files, so you could also give each of those a number to make them sort in a particular order, like 25039.5.Recommendations.

Otherwise, you can watch the link suggestions more carefully. The folder path should be shown under the name of each one (unless it’s in the top level of the vault.

2 Likes

Hey all the solution I’m using now ia [[folder name/note name|note name]], hides the path in reading view but avoids connecting between folders!

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