Format
The Bibtex citekeys used in this vault follows a specific pattern. It always starts with the four-digit year. Immediately after the year is each and every authors last name separated with an ampersand. Non-ASCII characters can be changed to their closest ASCII equivalent to help avoid issues with character encoding. Optionally (but strongly encouraged), a keyword from the title can be added to the citekey after an underscore.
Here are some examples:
2024denny2024denny_filenames
When naming things, good design tries to utilize the alphanumeric order as much as possible. In some referencing styles, references are ordered alphabetically by the last name of the author. Personally, when I’m scrolling through a list, I find more use out of them being in chronological order. When I use an appropriate search, I can see a publication log on a given topic or list of debates between scholars in the order the papers were published [see @1999ferris_response; @1996truscott_case]. This makes it easier to organize the development of a field of literature through time.
Prefixing literature note filenames with @ helps group them together in a crowded directory, but also comes in handy when we start to use it with other tools like Pandoc and the obsidian-pandoc-reference-list plugin.
Integration with Pandoc
Pandoc has a piugin called citeproc where citations can be written in Markdown and processed into its output. Pandoc citekeys are prefixed with a @ character and match the citekeys used in a BibTex file.
The citekeys are built into the document. This has additional benefits when used with the obsidian-pandoc-reference-list plugin in Obsidian. This allows several ways of using the filename as a Pandoc citation, a link to that literature note, or both.
For a Pandoc citation without linking, use a single set of square brackets around the prefixed citekey. The obsidian-pandoc-reference-list plugin will render these as full reference citations in the sidebar and an in-line citation. Pandoc will render them as both an in-line citation and an entry in the references section.
[@2012denny&kelley_plagiarism] (Denny & Kelley, 2012)
Denny & Kelley [-@2012denny&kelley_plagiarism] Denny & Kelley (2012)
These citekeys (at least in their parenthetical format) can be used as links to that literature note within Obsidian as well.
@2012denny_plagiarism (Denny & Kelley, 2012)
Even citations that are not linked can be opened from the sidebar References list generated by obsidian-pandoc-reference-list. Tthe down side, at least currently, is that these references do not count as true bidirectional links when it comes to features like Obsidian’s Graph View or other features that use links.