Hello,
I’ve started to use paperpile a few months ago and it’s already been quite useful for me. Thanks for the great app, it has definitely lots of potential!
I would like to +1 the issue with bibtex and INSPIREHEP database though. If only I could use INSPIRE bibtex entries and keys, I would be able to make paperpile my main bibliography management tool and I’d really love to do that! As of now this is kind of a show-stopper for me.
+1 for allowing some choice of citekeys
I’d advocate using the Google Scholar document ID, because it stays the same as a paper moves from working paper to preprint to final published version (the same may be true of the previous commenter’s suggestion of INSPIREHEP, but Google Scholar applies to all scholarly disciplines, not just high energy physics). So if a paper you cite changes its status after you create its citekey, all you need to do is click the (awesome) “update” button and you’ll get the new citation when you recompile the paper with the updated exported bibtex file.
An example is
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=2961583112046108454&hl=en&as_sdt=0,21&scilib=1
Of course, it would be horrific to have to type cite{2961583112046108454} throughout your paper, but there’s a simple workaround.
In latex you could have as many “aliases” as you like for the same object. So, if you’ve cited the same paper in two papers of your own, once as MooreNewmanEpi and once as mnPerc. You could have a file paperpile_aliases.sty whose content was:
\newcommand{\MooreNewmanEpi}{2961583112046108454}
\newcommand{\mnPerc}{2961583112046108454}
and then just:
usepackage{paperpile_aliases to the beginning of your latex document\cite{mnPerc to \cite{\mnPerc in one paper, and \cite{MooreNewmanEpi with \cite{\MoreNewmanEpi in the other.This approach would be particularly useful for those of us who have one giant master bib file that we use for all our papers. You could make a corresponding paperpile_aliases.sty file giving all of the alternative aliases for the same bib reference.
PS. Is there any ETA for the release of whatever you’re doing on this?
Welcome to our forum, @llorracc! Thanks for the feedback – I’ve added it to our tracker for the team’s consideration. The upcoming renovations of our web app and extension (which will include a new citekey editing tool) should be up and running before the end of the year. In case you haven’t already, check out our roadmap to see what else is in store.
+1 for this feature. The current solution seems to tag on a unique 2-letter ID for each bibtex key, but as far as I can tell, this is arbitrary so makes it difficult to know which paper is which for \cite auto-complete.
Thanks Paperpile team!
Any news on this? I have loved all the updating and classifying options so far, but the thought of not being able to control the citation keys is a bit of a nightmare — considering I have about 1.5k of those!
How about using a general scheme like AuthorYearFirstwordsoftitle-twocharacteridentifier, so e.g. for a paper from Larsen in 2022 with the title “Automatic discover of blabla”, the key would be Larsen2022automatic-xy for the whole database? In this way, one can easier locate the correct reference when citing it, but the previous identifier can be used as well to make it easy for the algorithm to generate unique bibtex keys?
It is really highly needed to include the title, in particular when you work in the asian community where there are usually 10s of paper with the same first author name and year in the same database.
I can report that the ability to customize BibTeX keys is being currently actively worked on by the team, as we know this is an important missing feature. In the meantime, a possible workaround for small libraries (albeit laborious if you have got a large library) is that you can manually set your own citation keys. Select a reference in your library, click the Edit button to open the Edit Details dialog, select Additional Fields, scroll down to Identifiers, select BibTeX key and you’ll find that you can set the BibTeX citation key to whatever you’d like. If you decide to set this field, make sure it is unique in your library. Click Save and Next to change the next citation key.
OK, I’ve just verified that the strategy above works (though it is a bit tedious).
I’m glad to see that Suzanne’s message below says the team is working on some solution. It’s a very tricky problem, though. The problem is that no combination of author, name, year, etc is guaranteed to uniquely identify a particular paper (though it will usually work). Furthermore, for scholars working at the frontier of research, many of the papers being cited will be working papers that do not have a doi or purl or a year of publication or a journal yet.
I’d vote that a good solution would be to allow the user to choose a method of unique identification of a paper, and to use that ID as the method to determine whether two papers with the same citekey are truly duplicates. If they have different UUID’s, they’re two different papers by Smith in the same journal in the same year (say). For my purposes, I’d choose the Google Scholar cluster ID, because then I can keep the reference to a given paper the same as the paper moves from working paper to preprint to forthcoming to published. That way, whenever I recompile one of my own papers, it will automatically update all the references to the latest info in my master paperpile bib.
OK, here’s a simpler proposal.
Instead of coming up with your own random letters at the end of the citekey, why don’t you choose (or allow the user to choose) say the last three characters in the Google collection identifier for the versions of the paper? Those will remain unique once Google has found the paper, even across revisions. So, a citekey generator that involves first author, first word from title, and last 3 from google collection would be both reasonably human-friendly and almost always unique.
Still hoping for a solution to this – the message that the team was working on this was over a year ago …
I’m happy to say that the ability to customize the pattern of your BibTeX keys is now available in beta. After signing up, waiting for your data to sync and activating the new Paperpile web app, go to Settings > Feature Preview where you can switch on the new “Customize BibTeX citation keys” feature. After doing that, go to Settings > General in the new app to set your citation pattern.
