This request pertains to papers from the ACL anthology. The entire collection is small enough for the community to just upload the .bib to latex projects and then easily cite any paper using just the key; no need to also add these papers (typically the vast majority to be cited) to a dedicated .bib file.
It would thus be very helpful to have a field that’s just the necessary bibkey, for easiest citation in a new project.
For example, this paper’s key is pinter-etal-2020-will. It’s right at the top of the associated bib file, and it’s canonical. If it’s too much trouble to automatically populate this, just give us the field and we’ll add them in ourselves.
Thanks for the request, Yuval, and apologies for the delay getting back to you. In case you’re still wondering: we assign unique bib keys to each paper by default when imported from the web, but these can be customized by selecting the reference in your library and hitting Shift-E or clicking Edit, then Additional fields… > BibTeX key. Would that be suitable?
On a directly related note - the team has been working on a citation key editing/customization dialog, which is expected to be rolled out following some updates of our UI and web-app. There should be more news about this soon, so stay tuned
Thanks for the reply! That extra step through Additional fields is a little much; Faster access to editing mode is a general pain point. Is there news on that customization dialog?
No concrete news yet, @Yuval_Pinter. We’ve posted the feature on our roadmap and intend to continue working on it after the release of some of the other features mentioned there.
