Citekeys: For Better Research / Life

Use citekeys to consistently and uniformly correlate in-text references with original source materials, not just in final submissions but also in notes and drafts.

For long research projects, it is necessary not only to keep straight a variety of sources but also to ensure that in-text references to those sources are unambiguous. This allows readers to trace all lines of thought to their original contexts. This is obviously a requirement of all formal publications.

But a clear and consistent citation practice should not be neglected in the writing that leads up to a final submission, such as notes, outlines, drafts, etc. When you are still the project’s primary (or only) reader, you must still be able to trace lines of thought to their origins.

In many cases, this may not be difficult. In the middle of a project, when everything is fresh in your working memory, you might be able to make sense of all kinds of non-standard forms of citation, no matter how informal: “cite book on national identity formation,” “quote comes from that article we read during week 3,” “see Foucault 257.”

But the larger a project is and the more time that passes between note-taking and final submission the more effort will be involved in tracing such citations to their sources.

In the case of a career researcher, informal citations like the above will inevitably lose their meaning as their originary contexts recede into the past. Which book on national identity formation was that? Which class? Which book by Foucault, and which edition?

The use of citekeys can greatly reduce the effort involved in mainlining clear lines of connection between citations and sources—not just in final products but in notes and drafts as well, and not just in single projects but in a lifetime of research.

Citekey Basics

A citekey (or citation key) is a unique code assigned to a particular piece of source material that can be used to quickly and consistently refer to that source.

A citekey is typically composed of some combination of the source’s year of publication, its primary author’s surname, and/or a short version of its title.

Here are three different citekeys, in three common styles, that could be used for the same source, the book Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson. Each offers a far more precise indication of what source is being referred to than the comparatively ambiguous “cite book on national identity formation”:

Anderson2006
andersonImaginedCommunities2006
anderson2006_ImaginedCommunities

It is important to note that citekeys are not expected to be clearly understandable to anyone other than the researcher who assigns them. Consider that “Anderson2006” in the example above could refer to any number of publications from the year 2006 by anyone with the surname Anderson.

In this way citekeys are unlike ISBN or DOI numbers: they are not universal indicators—they do not point directly and unambiguously to particular sources themselves.

Rather, citekeys point to a researcher’s own individual collection of bibliographic entries (more on this ahead). Citekeys offer, as a result, a simple, private system of shorthand for encoding reference information into any written document, all without the work entailed in writing out full formal citations and bibliographic entries in every instance.

Given their simplicity and ease of use, citekeys help to lower any barriers that might otherwise have impeded the inclusion of clear, reliable citations in even the most informal of written documents, including and especially those that are not intended for publication. They thereby help to eliminate any temptation to insert ambiguous and cryptic notes-to-self that risk baffling more than benefiting.

Your Bibliographic Database

For texts that are intended to be published, citekeys offer great flexibility, as they can be easily replaced with formal citations in whatever citation style is appropriate to the intended context, such as Chicago, MLA, Harvard, APA, etc.

This requires maintaining a centralized repository of bibliographic information wherein all citekeys are listed with relevant information about the associated source. This may sound more complicated than it is.

While it is possible to manage bibliographic information with one of the many popular reference management programs—such as Zotero, Endnote, or Mandeley—it is equally possible to maintain nothing more than a simple text document of entries like the following:

@book{Anderson2006,
        title = "Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism",
        author = Anderson, Benedict",
        year = "2006",
        publisher = "Verso",
        address = "London; New York",
}

The above entry happens to be written in a standardized format called BibTeX, often used or at least supported by reference management software. For the sake of future-proofing your bibliography, it might be worthwhile to use such a standardized format.¹

But such entries can easily be written and maintained in any format and without such software, using nothing more than a plaintext editing program like TextEdit (MacOS) or Notepad (Windows). The most important thing is to include all the relevant information about the source and associate it with a unique citekey.

From such information, it will be possible to produce citations and references in any of a seemingly endless array of standardized citation styles.²

Key Rule: Be Consistent

No matter what style of citekey or method of bibliography management is used, internal consistency is essential. Use a consistent citekey style—I use AuthorYEAR, like “Anderson2006”—so that each source is associated with a only single citekey. Do not use both “Anderson2006” and “andersonImaginedCommunities2006.”

Also, take care to ensure that each citekey is associated with only a single source. If you add a source by a different Anderson also written in 2006, assign it a unique citekey, like “Anderson2006a” or “Anderson2006-1.”

Note that using citekeys also makes it easy to include and distinguish between different editions of a single text. You might also have reason to cite the first edition of Imagined Communities (1983) alongside the reprint. Luckily, there is no confusing “Anderson1983” and “Anderson2006.”

Citekeys In Use

Choosing a citekey style, assigning citekeys to sources, and keeping them all matched up in a bibliography database is only the beginning.

Once you’ve done all that, how to go about putting them to use in your writings?

Here is an example from my reading notes:

Heise cites [#Anderson2006], who make a similar connection between representations and identity-formation.[5][#Heise2008]

I was not taking these notes for any specific project or a potential publication where accurate citations would be necessary. Nevertheless, it was so simple to include the citekeys and a page reference that I didn’t consider not doing it.

It was the use of citekeys, formatted in a distinct syntax—in brackets, preceed by the hash sign³—that made it effortless to find this reference (along with several others) to Anderson’s Imagined Communities in a file on my computer that is not obviously about the text in question and that I haven’t looked at or thought about since I wrote it. How about that?

Bonus: PDF Management

Aside from helping you keep your citations legible and locate deeply embedded notes in the recesses of your file system, citekeys can also help you keep track of PDFs and other digital documents. No longer worry over what to name that PDF. Enter its information into your bibliography file, assign it a citekey, and use the citekey as the name of the file. You’ll never have to guess what “Anderson2006.pdf” contains.