Zettlr does offer auto-completion once you type @ (at least from what I remember). I don’t know how hard it is to bring that to Obsidian, but it probably will come as a plugin. Format-wise, following the Zettlr example, pandoc should take care of the inclusion and formatting of the references.
I agree that there are at least two workflows (or parts of it) that might have to co-exist.
Citation is probably interesting for those looking to publish directly from Obsidian. Using @citekey (following pandoc’s) format is probably wise.
Equally, just keeping notes about the references is a matter of having a way to export and link to the reference manager (as I do now with Zotero using the mdnotes plugin or even manually by simply naming your notes after unique cite keys).
As you mention, the “tricky” part comes from the coexistence of these two aspects, particularly if what we want is both to cite and link with the same format.
- Citing with pandoc is usually done with
[See @citekey], but wouldn’t produce a node in the graph, or a clickable note. - In my opinion, citation with backlinks, e.g. using
[[@citekey]], doesn’t make much sense since most people would expect the preview/export to be the full citation, not necessarily the note about the reference. Maybe it can be used like this if we add options in the export dialogues.
If we don’t care as much about having the same format, and care just about the associations, those are just dependent on detecting the links, i.e. if it’s possible to associate notes that use the @citekey, and count them as links, then the ability to explicitly reference vs link might work well for most, but could make autocompletion confusing and complicated.