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Claude Vault Citations

by nord342
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Description

Ask questions about your Obsidian vault — every answer cites the exact notes and passages that support it, powered by Anthropic's Citations API.

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Latest Version

1.0.0
4 months ago

Changelog

Ask questions about your Obsidian vault — every answer cites the exact notes and passages that support it, powered by Anthropic's Citations API.

  • BM25 retrieval finds the most relevant notes for each question
  • Paragraph-level citations with clickable pills that jump to the source note
  • Prompt caching keeps follow-up questions cheap and fast
  • Configurable model Claude (Opus 4.7 / Sonnet 4.6 / Haiku 4.5), folders, and system prompt
See all version on GitHub

README file from

Github

Claude Vault Citations

Ask questions about your Obsidian vault and get back answers with verified citations to the exact notes and passages that support each claim — powered by Anthropic's Citations API.

Most "chat with your notes" plugins paste your notes into a prompt and hope the model attributes its claims correctly. This one uses Claude's first-class citations support, so every cited passage is a guaranteed pointer back to a real chunk of your vault.

sidebar screenshot placeholder

What makes it different

  • Real citations, not hallucinated ones. Citations come from Anthropic's native API, not from a prompt asking the model to "include sources." cited_text is guaranteed to come from your notes.
  • Click a citation, jump to the note. Each inline citation pill is a link to the source note at the cited paragraph.
  • Prompt caching. Large note context is cached on Anthropic's side, so follow-up questions in the same session are cheaper and faster.
  • Granular by paragraph. Notes are chunked into paragraph blocks before being sent, so citations land on the right passage — not the whole file.
  • Stays in your vault. Your Anthropic API key is stored locally in the vault's plugin data. Only the top-ranked notes for a given question are sent to Anthropic.

Install

From the community plugins browser (after submission is approved)

  1. Settings → Community plugins → Browse → search for "Claude Vault Citations"
  2. Install → Enable
  3. Open settings and paste your Anthropic API key

Manual install (now)

  1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release.
  2. Place them in <your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/claude-vault-citations/.
  3. In Obsidian: Settings → Community plugins → enable Claude Vault Citations.
  4. Open settings, paste your API key from console.anthropic.com.

Use

  • Click the quote icon in the left ribbon, or run Claude Vault Citations: Open chat from the command palette.
  • Type a question. The plugin ranks your notes against the question (BM25), sends the top-N as document blocks with citations enabled, and renders the response with clickable citation pills.
  • Select text in any note → run Ask Claude using current selection to seed a question.
  • ⌘/Ctrl-Enter sends.

Settings

Setting Default Notes
Model claude-sonnet-4-6 Opus 4.7 / Sonnet 4.6 / Haiku 4.5. Citations are supported on all current models.
Max response tokens 2048
Max notes per question 12 More notes = better recall, higher cost
Max characters per note 8000 ≈ 2000 tokens; long notes are trimmed
Include / exclude folders exclude: .trash,.obsidian,templates Comma-separated paths
Prompt caching on Cache the largest document block per request
System prompt (research-assistant default) Editable

How it works

  1. Retrieve. Your question is tokenized and scored against every markdown file in scope using BM25 with a small title boost.
  2. Chunk. Each candidate note is split into paragraph blocks (code fences kept intact). Blocks are sent as a custom content document so the model can cite at paragraph granularity.
  3. Ask. The notes are sent to Claude as document content blocks with citations.enabled: true. The last (largest) document gets cache_control: ephemeral so subsequent questions in the session are cheaper.
  4. Render. Response text blocks are rendered inline. Each one with a content_block_location citation gets a clickable pill that jumps to the right note at the right line.

Privacy

  • Your API key is stored locally in <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/claude-vault-citations/data.json.
  • For each question, only the top-N notes matched by BM25 are sent to Anthropic. Nothing else leaves your vault.
  • Anthropic's Citations docs state that the citations feature is eligible for Zero Data Retention if your org has a ZDR arrangement.

Development

git clone https://github.com/nord342/obsidian-claude-citations
cd obsidian-claude-citations
npm install
npm run dev      # esbuild watch mode
npm run build    # production bundle

Symlink the repo into <your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/claude-vault-citations/ to develop against a real vault.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

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