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Introduction

What is BibLib?

BibLib is an Obsidian plugin that provides reference management functionalities within the Obsidian environment. It operates by storing each reference, such as a paper or a book, as a standard Markdown note. The bibliographic metadata for each reference is embedded within the note's YAML frontmatter, structured according to the Citation Style Language (CSL) JSON format.

This approach maintains the entire reference library as plain text files (Markdown and YAML) inside the Obsidian vault. This makes the data portable, version-controllable, and searchable through Obsidian's native features.

CSL-JSON in Frontmatter

The use of CSL-JSON for storing bibliographic data offers several functional advantages:

  1. Interoperability: CSL-JSON is an open standard for citation data, which allows for compatibility with various external tools. Bibliography files generated by BibLib can be used with citation processors like Pandoc/Citeproc to format citations and bibliographies.
  2. Data Durability: Storing the reference library in human-readable plain text files (Markdown and YAML) ensures that the data is accessible even without the plugin. It also allows for version control using systems like Git.
  3. Integrated Knowledge Base: By treating references as notes within Obsidian, the plugin allows users to link, tag, and search their references just like any other note. This facilitates the integration of source materials with research notes.
  4. Bibliography Generation: BibLib can generate a bibliography.json file from the CSL-JSON data in the literature notes. This file can be used with tools like Pandoc to automate the creation of formatted citations and reference lists.