I know each reference in Paperpile has a 5 character code, behind the scenes, hidden in the link text. Perhaps these could be made visible and able to be copied, so they could be pasted, somehow, into any word processor for in text citations. When it comes time to generate a bibliography, one could upload the document to Google Docs and have Paperpile scan the document, insert citations, and generate a bibliography. Other citation managers have done it this way and it frees the user to go with whichever word processor they prefer, and potentially work offline.
We have plans to support those workflows you describe. In particular with our upcoming Word plugin it should be easy to insert those codes to any text editor and then scan/format it.
The main use case I can see are popular Markdown based writing systems.
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That’s great news! A unique but human readable code in brackets or slashes like {Smith2014a} that is permanently associated with a reference would be wonderful, so you can learn them and type them in easily. Bookends uses codes like this, I believe, or perhaps it was Sente.
Isn’t this what the ctrl-K “citation key” command already does? It copies an identifier such as Smith2014-ju
Cool. What is it for, though? I wonder if Paperpile can scan the paper and turn it into a citation, and add it to the bibliography.
The citation key with “ctrl-K” is currently mainly used for use with LaTeX/BibTeX.
If you include those codes in your document, Latex and BibTeX will scan these citation codes and create the final document with the help of a BibTeX file which holds the actual citation information.
One way how this could work in the future is that you open a document with those codes in word and let our word-plugin create the final document. Since Word can ready every text format and you can export from all text-processors to word somehow that would be a very generic way to support many other writing platforms.
Even better would be not having to use Word. Maybe a Google Docs plug-in that would scan and replace, or PaperPile itself in Docs having this capability. (I’m just not a fan of relying on Word specifically, because then I have to buy it too.) Being able to use whichever writing program you like, inserting codes, then uploading to GDocs in whichever format it can read at the end to generate a bibliography and format citations would be pretty nice.
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