Paper Link

Paper Vault

An Obsidian plugin that keeps your papers in your vault. Paste an academic paper URL and it becomes a readable, titled link — automatically, just when you press ctrl+v/command+v — with a 📝 button to the paper's own note, so every paper has exactly one place for your understanding, AI summaries, and links from the rest of your notes.

Paste https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 into a note and it becomes:

Attention Is All You Need (arXiv 2017) [[Papers/Attention Is All You Need|📝]]

The paste itself is never delayed — the URL lands instantly, and the titled link is swapped in as soon as the metadata arrives (usually well under a second).

Coming from Zotero? See Migrating from Zotero.

Supported sources

Non-paper URLs are never touched: if a page has no citation metadata, the URL is simply left as you pasted it.

Usage

On paste — copy a paper URL and paste it into a note. It converts automatically. Only fires when the clipboard is exactly one URL; pasting prose containing URLs does nothing.

Existing notes — run the command "Paper Vault: Convert paper URLs in current note" from the command palette. It converts every bare paper URL in the active note, skipping URLs that are already links, in frontmatter, or inside code blocks, and reports a summary when done.

Paper pages

Every converted paper link also gets a 📝 button pointing at the paper's own note — one place per paper for your understanding, AI summaries, and links from the rest of your notes:

Attention Is All You Need (arXiv 2017) [[Papers/Attention Is All You Need|📝]]

The button is a real wikilink, so the paper's page shows every note that mentions it under Backlinks, and the graph view connects them.

• One page per paper. Pages are identified by a paper_id in frontmatter (arxiv:1706.03762, acl:N19-1423, doi:…), not by file name: abs/pdf/ versioned URLs of the same paper share one page, and you can rename or move pages freely. An arXiv preprint and its published version (same title) also share one page — the extra id is recorded under also_ids.
• Created when you need it. By default the page is created the first time you click 📝 (so casually pasted links don't litter the vault). Switch to Immediately or Off in settings.
• Pre-filled. Frontmatter with title, authors, year, venue, URL, PDF, DOI, a BibTeX-style citekey, status: to-read, and tags: [paper]; the body has the abstract plus My Notes / AI Summary / Related sections. Use your own template file with {{title}}, {{authors}}, {{abstract}}, {{tldr}}, {{citekey}}, {{links}}, … placeholders.
• TL;DR. A one-sentence summary from Semantic Scholar is added as tldr when available. The keyless API is heavily rate-limited; a free API key in settings makes it reliable, and "Refresh metadata of current paper page" retries later.
• Overview table. A new papers folder gets a Papers.base (Bases) table of all paper pages, sortable by year with a To read view. Recreate it with "Create papers base".
• Older notes. "Add paper page links to current note" adds 📝 buttons to paper links that were converted before this feature existed.

Migrating from Zotero

"Migrate Zotero notes to paper pages" turns notes exported from Zotero (recognized by their Zotero URI property) into paper pages, so the vault is the single home for your papers. A preview lists everything before anything changes.

• Note bodies are kept; the abstract moves from properties into a callout.
• Zotero properties are renamed to the plugin's (Title → title, Authors → authors, Short Title → aliases, Collections → collections, Tags → keywords, File Path → pdf_file, …); Zotero-only ones are dropped, and your own properties are kept. Notes with content get status: read.
• Duplicate Zotero items of one paper are merged into a single page: list properties are combined, the duplicates' notes are appended, links to them are redirected, and the extra copies go to the system trash.
• Notes move into the paper pages folder under their current name; links update automatically, and ![[Zotero.base]] embeds now point at the papers base.
• Every original file is first copied to .paper-link-backup/ in the vault.

Link format

[Title (Venue Year)](url), degrading gracefully when metadata is missing: [Title (Venue)], [Title (Year)], or just [Title]. If the venue already contains the year (e.g. ICLR 2024), the year isn't repeated.

Known limitation: OpenReview

OpenReview fronts its API with a Cloudflare Turnstile challenge that blocks all non-interactive clients, including Obsidian's request layer. OpenReview URLs therefore currently stay as raw URLs, with a notice explaining why. The resolver is implemented and will start working automatically if OpenReview relaxes the block.

Safety behavior

• A paste is never blocked or mangled: on any fetch failure the raw URL stays and a notice is shown.
• If you edit or undo before the title arrives, the replacement is silently dropped.
• URLs pasted into an existing [text]( link are left alone.

arXiv rate limits

arXiv's API asks clients to leave ~3 seconds between requests. The plugin serializes its arXiv calls to respect this, retries a throttled request a few times with exponential backoff, and — if it's still throttled — leaves the URL raw and tells you to try again rather than failing silently. Converting a note with many arXiv links is therefore paced deliberately (a few seconds per link).

Installation

From the community directory: Settings → Community plugins → Browse → "Paper Vault" (formerly "Paper Link"; plugin id paper-link).

Manual: copy main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/paper-link/, then enable the plugin in Settings → Community plugins.

Development

npm install
npm test           # unit + live network tests (node)
npm run build      # typecheck + bundle to main.js
npm run dev        # watch mode

All metadata resolution lives in src/resolvers.ts, paper-page logic (naming, templates, link scanning) in src/paperPage.ts, and the Zotero mapping in src/zoteroMigration.ts — all pure with the HTTP function injected, so they run under plain node for tests. src/main.ts is the thin Obsidian layer. Adding a new source is a small resolver object plus a test.

License

MIT