Autogenerate citekeys
This exists in the desktop app going to Papers Settings. You can set the citekey generation there.
On similar lines, would it be possible to get the "default" behaviour of Papers 3 back or a bit more flexibility for auto-generated citekeys?
Formerly, this used to be "Author:2020xz" (colon and two letters) instead of "Author.2020" (full-stop) or "Author.2020hk4k" (four random characters) in case of two entries with same first author and same year.
Specifically, it would be nice to be able to add own constant values such as "." or ":" to the "Available" section and maybe even a "random 2 letters" or else.
I'm not sure I understand the question. Currently the citekeys will be what you put in the citekey settings. If there is a duplicate citekey detected we add 2 random letters to help distinguish between them.
Thanks for your reply, Jacob! Maybe I should clarify that I've imported my Papers 3 library and kept the citekeys since I'm heavily relying on the BibTeX export to reference my documents. This being said, most of my citekeys (and the way I have memorise them) is "Author:2020xx".
Maybe I should therefore separate my question into two parts:
1) Since the new format seems to be "Author.2020", would it be feasible to enable choosing the separator? (Or alternatively, can I back-convert thousands of "Author:2020xx" into "Author.2020xx" keys easily keeping the "xx" assignments?) This would help not needing to remember whether I imported the paper before or after switching to Readcube. (Currently, I'm updating by hand.)
2) Can I get (or opt to get) two random letters for all entries (not just duplicates)?
3) Potentially 1 and 2 could be combined in a "use old cite key style" option, maybe ... :)
[4) This is a bit off-topic, but could there be a key binding (as there used to be one in Papers 3) to copy the cite key (as plain as "Author:2020xx"). I know there is the little icon, I can click, but this is a bit cumbersome if one goes for multiple papers in a row.]
1) You can change the citekeys to whatever you want. We default to period for the simple reason that our search can't handle the ":". For instance if you try and search for citekey:author:2020 this will break our search as the second colon confuses it. We can look into supporting different delimiters but at this time we need the period for search purposes.
2) We can look into this. No promises.
3) Ha ha. If we implemented I wouldn't want to create a locked in feature of both but I would rather expand the settings to allow different delimiters with a warning on colons and then an additional option for only duplicates get xx or all citekeys get xx.
4) Key bindings are tricky but we are actively working on a way to drag and drop, copy citekeys quick etc.
To be clear you can keep your Papers 3 citekeys and if you import any new references and want to manually curate them for now that's fine. Search just won't work if you are searching for them.
Andreas Besginow
Hello there,
before you say anything. Yes, this is a duplicate of https://support.papersapp.com/support/discussions/topics/30000001231
But, only because discussion has been closed in the other thread and the feature has not been implemented yet.
The last post even states that "you can set manual entries and if not, it'll use the DOI".
The point of autogenerating citekeys is that you can define a format like
<first author last name><year><first word of title>
and this is set as the default citekey, instead of having to manually set this for every single paper.
This feature does not exist yet! (I would be happy to be proven wrong, though)
Best regards
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