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Scholar Sidekick — Cite from any identifier

by mlava
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Description

This plugin has not been manually reviewed by Obsidian staff. Paste a DOI, PMID, ISBN, or arXiv ID and replace it with a formatted citation. 10,000+ CSL styles. No reference manager required.

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Latest Version

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Changelog

See all version on GitHub

README file from

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Scholar Sidekick — Cite from any identifier (Obsidian plugin)

Paste a DOI, PMID, ISBN, arXiv ID, ADS bibcode, or PMCID into a note and replace it with a formatted citation. No reference manager required.

Backed by the public Scholar Sidekick API — a transparent, composable interface to authoritative scholarly metadata sources (Crossref, NCBI, arXiv, Open Library, ADS, WHO IRIS).

Already using a Zotero / BibTeX library inside Obsidian? The Citations plugin is excellent for that workflow. Scholar Sidekick is for the case before you have a curated library — you want a citation now, from an identifier you have right now.

Commands

Command What it does
Format selection as citation Wraps the selected text (an identifier or text containing one) in a citation in your default style.
Replace identifier at cursor with citation Detects the identifier under or near the cursor and replaces it (or appends, by setting). No selection required.
Insert citation… Opens a modal: type/paste an identifier, pick from 5 quick styles or search 10,000+ CSL styles, insert at cursor.
Export note citations to BibTeX Scans the active note for every identifier and saves a .bib file next to the note — ready to import into Zotero / Mendeley / EndNote.
Export note citations to RIS Same, but RIS format.

Supported identifiers

  • DOI (bare or doi.org URL)
  • PMID (bare, labelled, or pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov URL)
  • PMCID (bare or ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/... URL)
  • ISBN (10 or 13)
  • arXiv (modern 2301.07041 or legacy cs.CL/0301001)
  • ISSN
  • ADS bibcode (within the modal — server-side detection)

The detection regexes are vendored from the upstream API source, with a build-time drift detector ensuring the vendored copy never falls out of sync with the canonical patterns.

Settings

  • Default citation style — Vancouver, APA, AMA, IEEE, CSE built-in; the modal lets you persist any of 10,000+ styles.
  • Output format — plain text or HTML. The five built-in styles emit text only; HTML applies to CSL styles selected via the search modal (those preserve italics, small caps, and other inline markup that survives in Obsidian's reading view). Selecting HTML with a built-in style falls back to text rather than failing.
  • Replace mode — replace identifier in place, or append the citation after it.
  • Show sources & conflicts (experimental) — sends ?provenance=1 to surface which upstream source supplied each field, once Phase 12 of the Scholar Sidekick API ships.
  • API base URL — override only for staging or self-hosted instances.

Privacy

  • The plugin sends the identifier text you ask it to format directly to https://scholar-sidekick.com/api/format over HTTPS.
  • No API key is required; the API treats the plugin as the anonymous rate-limited tier (60 requests / minute / IP).
  • Inputs are not retained or used for training. See the API privacy policy.

Provenance

Every API call carries a x-scholar-transform-version header so you can pin reproducibility. The plugin logs x-request-id and x-scholar-transform-version to the developer console for diagnostic support — open the Obsidian dev console (Cmd+Opt+I / Ctrl+Shift+I) to view them.

Build from source

See BUILD.md.

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