Gdoc-specific account behavior

I have a question about the behavior of the gdoc-specific account

  • Lets say Person A adds two citations, Paper 1 and Paper 2 to a gdoc
  • Now if someone edits the Paper 1 entry directly in the gdoc-specific account by going to Paperpile > View All References, the entry for Paper 1 is then delinked from person A’s account.
  • However, the Paper 2 entry is still linked to Person A
  • Now if Person A updates both Paper 1 and Paper 2 in their personal account, only Paper 2 updates will propagate.

(1) Is the above accurate?
(2) Is there any way of knowing that Paper 2 is linked to Person A but Paper 1 is not, without actually keeping track of which entries were directly edited via the gdoc-specific account? Both Paper 1 and Paper 2 will show up as “Added by Person A” IIUC.

Thanks for the question, @shntnu. You are correct, but going a bit further: any citation edited by any user in the ‘View all references’ page will become unlinked from the original library, whereas edited by the user who added it or others. This is indicated at the bottom of the edit window (when accessed via the document):

You can find a little more info about that in this section of our Help Center. To answer your second question: no, there won’t be any indication that the reference is now unlinked from the library. This would make sense in my opinion, so I’ll add the idea to our internal tracker for the team to consider over future reviews.

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