Introduction

What is BibLib?

BibLib is an Obsidian plugin for managing bibliographic references. Each reference is stored as a Markdown note with metadata in the YAML frontmatter, structured according to the CSL-JSON format.

References are stored as plain text files (Markdown and YAML) inside your Obsidian vault.

CSL-JSON in Frontmatter

BibLib uses the CSL-JSON format for bibliographic metadata. This format is an open standard used by citation processors like Pandoc/Citeproc.

Example frontmatter:

---
id: smith2023
type: article-journal
title: Example Article
author:
  - family: Smith
    given: Alice
container-title: Journal Name
issued:
  date-parts:
    - [2023]
DOI: 10.1234/example
tags:
  - literature_note
---

Why CSL-JSON?

1. Standard format: CSL-JSON is used by Pandoc, Zotero, and other citation tools. Bibliography files generated by BibLib work with these tools without conversion.

2. Plain text storage: Data is stored in human-readable YAML. The files remain accessible without the plugin and can be version-controlled with Git.

3. Obsidian notes: References are regular Obsidian notes. They can be linked, tagged, searched, and organized like any other note.

4. Bibliography generation: BibLib can generate bibliography.json and bibliography.bib files for use with Pandoc or other citation processors.