Academic Literature Formatted Citations Support

[sambouwer]

Hi @fmksr2007, today I gave this idea some more thought.

It should be possible to stick to Anytype’s “everything is an Object” paradigm when referencing internal or external resources. I hope I can make the idea clear with the following example:

Imagine you write a text in Object A, and you need to reference an external source (in this example, an article from a scientific journal) to credit their work.

1. You select the relevant part of your text and use the quick menu to link to a resource:
   

2. You then create a new Object (let’s call it Object B) using the “+ Create new object” option:
   
   You could create a new object with Object Type “Citation” (currently not a built-in Object Type, but you could make a custom Object Type).

3. You choose a template that matches the kind of resource you are referencing (book, journal article, website, etc.). For certain kinds of resources, you could even have multiple templates, like for journal articles: a template for “Journal article (Vancouver)” and another for “Journal article (APA)”, and so on.
   You fill out all the details of the external resource (journal name, article title, etc., as listed in my previous post). Up to now, this is almost all possible with already existing functionality. It is not yet possible to select/choose a template when creating a new Object through these steps, but there is an existing request that could help here:

Option to apply template to an existing object

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. I find myself too often making changes to a template. With this change, I would like to apply these template changes to existing objects. I have to do it manually for all my objects. Describe the solution you’d like Would be great to have a feature to apply changes to a template to existing objects. This option could be optional - depends on the end user if he/she wants to apply changes to the template to existing objects.

Template for the default object when created from anywhere

There is already a feature request for the same Kindly upvote it Other similar template related feature requests / bug reports

4. We then come to the core of this request: allow users to choose a specific style of displaying the linked resource. Right now, there is only one (non-configurable) way the linked Object is displayed when hovering the mouse over the texts:
   
   If you could configure what and how information is displayed, your request could be covered, while also allowing for flexibility for other scenario’s. I’m not yet sure about the best implementation of this configuration. I can imagine that this is something you’d need another kind of template for which can be applied to the link itself, but I can also imagine that this is something to configure within the Object Type Template that is used to create the Object that holds the reference (with title, journal, etc.).

5. For bonus points, I think a Block similar to the Table of Contents (/toc) block for References would be awesome: type /references to add a block that shows all links/references in the Object and updates dynamically when new references are added.

Looking forward to your thoughts!