Creating A Bibliography Automatically With Obsidian

Making your bibliography (list of references) at the end of anything you write is normally the worst part about writing anything. It's not the research, learning something new and exciting, or the writing where you get to take that research and let people know how interesting it is. It's "Name, Year, Title etc." over and over and over....

So, to save myself a lot of hassle I started to do my bibliography as I went, but this year I've taken it one step further and started using Obsidian to make my bibliography for me.

Why Do This?

So I've talked on here about creating your bibliography as you go and how important that is in the long term. You don't want to be struggling at the last minute to pull all this information together only to find that you've lost the book you were quoting heavily from and can't get the reference information from it anymore.

For me having it set up this way makes sense - I'm still keeping a track of all of the information but now I'm less likely to worry about putting it in alphabetical order or making sure I've definitely included all of the texts since it's done for me.

I also only need to write the information once for this since I'm taking notes onto the computer.

How I Did This?

So I set this up in Obsidian so this is geared towards that!

Firstly I made templates for each type of item I would need to reference, so Journals, books, book chapters etc. and in this included all of the information I'd cite.

So the page looks like this:

Can you tell which each of these are for?

After this I moved all of the templates to the Templates folder I set up and made sure I could find them easily again.

So now we have the templates, what about showing the information?

Notice how each part of the information has a double colon after it? That's what allows Dataview (by Michael Brennan) to search and pull out the information.

Each of these templates gets added to the start of a note about a book or online article in the MOC page for that, and if at any point I only need a single note for something (I've condensed down) then the information will still be there and accessible to me.

So we write the following to make dataview work

And then when we change views from edit to preview we'll see that it's gathered the information we've given it and displayed it in the table!

Results?

So, since everything I'm reading and logging in this vault is for the PhD, I'm just tagging it with #citation however if you wanted to work on multiple projects I'd recommend tagging them with a name for that project, or if a text can be used in multiple you can then tag it for them.

And there you have the automatic table that's created!

Next steps are to

1. Copy the table into word

2. Find and replace "-" with just a simple comma

3. Double check you've not left out important information

This will remove the extra, unneeded dashes which act as placeholders, give you your commas between items in the reference and mean you have a bibliography in alphabetical order with half the effort.

Also, as you can see I haven't finished filling out the information about AGOT yet -so that would be something to watch out for when I follow step 3 - double checking all the important info is there!

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Hey! Tara here and thanks for checking out my blog. I update every Tuesday with posts about studying tips, advice and talk about productivity and organisation too. If you want to keep up to date with my latest blog posts I’d love it if you subscribed to this blog.