List all roam notes citing a citar note

How To
1

Hi

I use roam for notes and citar for citations. With citar-create-note (from the citar-org-roam
package) one can make notes about papers. The folder of these notes lives within my roam folder (as
a subfolder because I am still not sure how to best integrate citar notes with roam so I want to
keep it separated for now). The command citar-create-note makes sure to add :ID: and
:ROAM_REFS: to the :PROPERTIES:. So org-roam knows about them.

I have several (ordinary) roam notes where I reference papers using citar. I use
citar-insert-citation for that, producing something like this [cite:@ChuangNielsen2011].

Now suppose I have a citar note about @ChuangNielsen2011. With roam backlinks I can see all roam
notes referencing this note by ID. What I am missing is a way to find all roam notes which cite
the corresponding paper. Is there a simple way to do this?

What I don’t want to do is to make ID links instead of citations. The main reason is that for most
papers I do not make citar notes and even for the ones I do I might not yet have one in place.

2

I’d just look for this string with grep or ripgrep (or deadgrep). You can also look to use something like consult-ripgrep (there is a post about it with a short video).

There are more posts about this method; I suggest you search for ripgrep, grep, etc in this forum.

3

Also… Backlinks buffer should show the Ref section that list all notes that reference @ChuangNielsen2011 in addition to backlinks via ID…

4

Thanks @nobiot this is what I searched for: the backlinks buffer!

The reason I didn’t find it was that org-roam-buffer-toggle does not contain the words I was searching for. If it was called org-roam-backlinks-buffer-toggle I would have found it. Maybe I create an alias. Also, I used consult-org-roam-backlinks to find the backlinks and this doesn’t include the reflinks.

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5

As future reference, you might like to refer to the user manual. You can read it online or in the Info system in Emacs.

The first hit when I searched for “backlink” with “CTRL-F” on my browser is the section named Org-roam Buffer.

6

@nobiot yes sure I know that manual and I actually use manuals as one of my primary sources of information (I almost never ask in forums).

But this particular time I was just particularly unlucky because I already had something which showed the backlinks and I wrongly assumed that this was the backlinks buffer (or at least equivalent to it). I hence did not further search for the backlinks related stuff because I thought that it was intentional to only include the backlinks and that this feature really does not exist as a native solution. I actually just wanted to confirm here that it does not exist and that I have to rely on a search based solution as in your first post.

I was really struck that this was not the case and that I completely missed the actual backlinks buffer. I like the consult-org-roam-backlinks command but somehow it prevented me from looking into the backlinks buffer when I originally got familiar with org roam (few month ago). I cannot imagine that I did not see the backlinks buffer (because I actually read the manual and I liked the idea of backlinks) but probably I thought that the command shows the same as the backlinks buffer and hence I forgot about the real thing.

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