As far as citations within markdown docs, pandoc-style citatations are the gold standard.
Proposed solution
The idea is for Obsidian to directly handle anything in the form @citekey, [See @citekey, p 22-23] and variants (https://pandoc.org/demo/example19/Extension-citations.html).
The corresponding preview is generated using citeproc-js based on a .BIB file or CSL-JSON file (user maintained or software maintaned, by Zotero for example).
There should also be an extra pane for the bibbliography of the current file (or a Bibliography section at the bottom of the current file). Possibly, even a pop-up preview on each citation.
On broad strokes, this is essentially the approach that Zettlr follows.
Current workaround (optional)
Right now, there are a few plugins to work with citations. However, either they don’t use the pandoc format at all, or they provide some support of outputting [@citekey], but there’s no handling in preview (and they can’t because the API isn’t there yet).
This is not crucial for me (I do a md → latex conversion with pandoc anyway), but support the idea. Maybe it would also prompt me to leave some of my more “lightweight” writing in markdown instead of bothering with the tex.
I think it’s an important feature and important to push. As I explained in another FR (Citations and bibliography), I would add a few more features but having pure Pandoc-style citations is already an important step forward.
I would also suggest offering the possibily to write the bibliography in YAML format.
The second FR mentioned above (Recognise pandoc citations as Obsidian links) also makes a good point: it’s good to make citations, but it’s also important to link them with personal notes when they exist, ideally avoiding duplicating content / links. And it is possible to make this completely compatible with the curent proposal (see my message #10 there):
edit mode: clicking the Pandoc citation brings to the literature note if it exists
preview mode: add a link to the literature note (if it exists) after the bibliographical item
export, publish : omit any link to a literature note, except if explicitly inserted (for example using filename)
Hey all, the Pandoc Reference List plugin may be helpful to some of you (currently installable through BRAT). It displays formatted citations in the side bar for the active document:
Hi, this plugin looks great! But after I installed it, I couldn’t enable it, getting a “Failed to load Plugin” message in settings. Any idea what might cause this?
I do have the current version of Pandoc installed on my machine. I also have the Citations plugin and the Pandoc plugin installed, so perhaps there is some kind of incompatibility issue?
