Obsidian Citation Guide

A skill for using the Obsidian Citation Plugin to integrate bibliographic references from BibTeX or CSL-JSON files into the Obsidian knowledge management workflow. Based on obsidian-citation-plugin (1K stars), this skill enables researchers to create literature notes, insert citations, and build interconnected knowledge bases grounded in their reference libraries.

Overview

Academic researchers need their notes to be deeply connected to their references. The Obsidian Citation Plugin bridges BibTeX or CSL-JSON bibliography files with Obsidian's note-taking system, enabling seamless creation of literature notes from reference entries, quick citation insertion while writing, and automatic backlinking between notes and their source references.

Unlike Zotero-specific integrations, this plugin works with any tool that exports standard BibTeX or CSL-JSON, making it compatible with Zotero, JabRef, Mendeley, EndNote, and even hand-crafted .bib files.

Setup and Configuration

Prerequisites

• Obsidian with community plugins enabled
• A BibTeX (.bib) or CSL-JSON (.json) bibliography file
• The bibliography file should be accessible from the Obsidian vault directory

Installation

• Open Obsidian Settings and navigate to Community Plugins