paper-dataview

Paper Dataview

Overview

Adds standardized YAML frontmatter to Obsidian paper notes, enabling queries with the Dataview plugin. Can be run on new notes (alongside paper-note) or retroactively on existing notes.

Required MCP

MarkusPfundstein/mcp-obsidian must be installed and configured.

Input

Accepts paper metadata from paper-fetch / paper-zotero output, or ask user for:

• Note file path(s) to add frontmatter to
• Zotero item key (if available)
• Custom tags (optional)

Steps

1. For each paper, collect: title, authors, year, DOI, source, Zotero key, user tags
2. Read existing note via mcp-obsidian (if note already exists)
3. Prepend YAML frontmatter block (insert before existing content, or add at top if none)
4. Write updated note back via mcp-obsidian

YAML Frontmatter Template

---
title: "{{title}}"
authors: ["{{Author1}}", "{{Author2}}"]
year: {{year}}
doi: "{{doi}}"
source: "{{arxiv|pubmed|biorxiv|other}}"
tags: [{{topic-tag-1}}, {{topic-tag-2}}]
zotero_key: "{{zotero_key}}"
read_status: unread
date_added: {{YYYY-MM-DD}}
---

Example Dataview Queries

After frontmatter is added, users can query in Obsidian:

TABLE authors, year, source
FROM "Papers"
WHERE contains(tags, "transformer")
SORT year DESC

TABLE title, read_status
FROM "Papers"
WHERE read_status = "unread"

Output

Confirmation of updated notes:

Updated frontmatter in:
  Papers/attention-is-all-you-need.md
  Papers/bert-pre-training.md

Common Issues

• Existing frontmatter: Check for an existing --- block before prepending. Merge fields rather than overwriting if a note already has partial frontmatter.
• Author list format: Always write as a YAML list ["Author1", "Author2"], not a comma-separated string.