Citations of documents: citations.yaml and cited-by.yaml files

Papis supports downloading and exploring citations. You can explore the citations referenced by a document (citing references) and those that reference the document (cited-by references).

If your document has a doi associated and you use the updater from this doi, or you added information from the doi when you added the document, then chances are that the info.yaml file has a citations key within it.

In this case, Papis can actually get metadata from these dois and store it in a citations.yaml file, for references that the document has within it.

You can generate this file either from the web application or from the papis citations command. Refer to their respective documentations in order to know more about it.

As of version v0.13, it is also possible to generate a cited-by.yaml file with the information of other papers that cite your document. This is done by scanning your Papis library for documents that cite said document. You can also generate this file from the web application or from the papis citations command.

The citations command first tries to find information that already exists in the library. That is to say, before doing any online query, it tries to find the relevant information in your library (e.g. the Crossref importer supports citations that can be cross-referenced).

Notice that Papis copies most of the metadata to the citations.yaml and cited-by.yaml files. Even though this might seem quite heavy on disk space, as a rule of thumb all the citations.yaml files of a library with 2k papers containing physics papers will amount to only around 30MB.