Saving references?

[reywright]

In Zettelkasten, there’s the idea of a slip box, and essentially having 2 slip boxes: one for ideas / concepts / whatever, and another for references.

What’s the recommended way to mimic this in supernotes? I don’t like the idea of having a separate application as my use for references isn’t academic. I mostly want to save references to present a better authority to argument situation if I ever want to convey an idea to someone (or myself in the future).

I mostly would want to save a quote, who it’s from, and the book it’s from (page number I could take it or leave it). I could easily add these to supernotes but the problem is that I’d be intermingling these 2 concepts and I basically never want to see the reference cards.

I’m assuming I could do some type of filter situation but I really like clicking on “home” and being able to get home and reset all the filters.

I feel like there could be some feature added to Supernotes to facilitate this? Offering “workspaces” to people who sign up for premium subscriptions? Offer the ability to set “Home” to a custom filter (that for me would always filter out things with a certain tag that would refer to a reference card)? But yeah anything that you all could add to facilitate this would help greatly here.

[tobias]

Hi @reywright,

Thanks for sharing your workflow! Hopefully some of the suggestions below will help.

One thing to question is whether you would like to reference ‘reference cards’ multiple times. If a reference only needs to be used once then you can use the built-in markdown syntax using ^[Enter Reference Here] and it will automatically add it to the bottom of a card, like one of my cards below:

However, if you would like each reference to be it’s own card there are a few things you can do to prevent them from appearing. As you mentioned tagging all cards with #reference would work well and then you could always have an exclusion filter enabled like below. This will be persistent unless you refresh your page.

You could also make use of Visibility, and mark all of your reference cards with the new ‘Invisible’ card status, which will remove all trace of reference cards as the invisible card filter is active by default.

One last idea, is creating two parents one called “General” and one called “References”, if you add all of your ideas, concepts etc. cards to the General parent and all your references to the Reference parent then they will always be separated; and then Home would serve as intended to show you all of the cards you have written.

Do let me know if any of these suggestions work for you

[Darren_M_McDonald]

Thanks for posting this @tobias. I wasn’t aware that there was already a built-in markdown for references. I was trying to find a way to add references from the “cheatsheet”. Maybe the cheatsheet could be updated to include this command?

I am wanting to include more than one source on the one card and though the workaround you suggested works, it is too cumbersome for folks like me who have to work with sources as part of writing.
So, if you could come up with a better way in which Supernotes could handle references, it would be really helpful to me.

Additionally, I would like there to be an export option for creating a bibliography list of the sources for the cards that are exported.

I am not sure what would be the best way to go about this, but taking a look at how Ulysses and SuperNotecard https://www.supernotecard.com/tutorials/how-to-cite-references/ do this may offer somewhere to start.

[tobias]

Hi @Darren_M_McDonald, glad to hear it was helpful! Good point about references not being in the cheatsheet, will add this.

What sounds like would be really helpful for your use case is to add custom metadata to cards, this is something we are working on for a future update. For example, you could create a custom metadata types called “Bibliography” and then sort / filter accordingly, with export options as well. Thanks for sharing your use case, very helpful for us!