pandoc style citation in new note editor?

I am excitedly trying out the connectivity between the new reader and note editor and envisioning major changes to my workflow after also reading about upcoming native export of notes to markdown. Thank you!

My question concerns notes created by dragging a highlight over from the reader to the note editor. How do I go about configuring the citation style used in the resulting note, and in particular, is there a way to make it a pandoc style citation? This would create exactly the format for notes I was hoping to be able to export to markdown eventually.
  • The citation style displayed in the note is just a placeholder author-date citation. When using the Add Note button in the supported word processors, which is the primary workflow we were designing for, Zotero will insert active citations that will be formatted in the style selected for that document.

    We haven't yet implemented anything special for Markdown export, so for now that just uses the placeholder style. Being able to choose a citation style at export time might make sense. Zotero will also be gaining a Citation Key field soon, at which point using that instead could be a display and/or export option.
  • Yes, the citation key would also work very well for my purposes. I will keep an eye out. Thanks for your help!
  • Yeah, I think pandoc-style citations as note export would be terrific and would also dovetail really well with the R-markdown/Rstudio integration
  • I would love pandoc style citations!
  • I forget — did Citation Key ever get exposed to CSL? If so, we could just have a Pandoc Citations style and have that be an available style option (unless additional customization options would be necessary). If not, it'd have to be a separate option.
  • CSL 1.0.2 has a new citation-key variable, yes. One thing we can't do with a style is the [-smith1776] syntax for suppress author
  • Actually, we probably don't want to get into full citation style functionality anyway. There's no guarantee that the exported note represents the full document, so I doubt it makes sense to try to implement Ibid., disambiguation, etc., and then awkwardly tack on a full bibliography at the end. And a full bibliography often couldn't be represented properly in non-HTML Markdown syntax anyway (with indents, spacing, etc.), which is why I've said before that it didn't make sense to export bibliographies to Markdown rather than HTML. So I think you either use Add Note one or more times with one of the word processor plugins, or you export one or more notes to Markdown and use pandoc to generate your final document.

    Some sort of customizability of the author-date placeholders might make sense (for display within Zotero as well as export), but I think we mostly just need an export option to use pandoc citations instead of the placeholders.
  • Yes, I think the option to replace the placeholders with standard pandoc citations on export makes sense. If there would be a further refinement I'd want, it would just be that if I wrote something like "Smith says ... [-@smith1776]" manually in a note, that this would export verbatim.
  • Scratch my second suggestion -- I see that the markdown export already does that!
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