cite_key Pattern DSL

crossmem generates citation keys using a pattern DSL inspired by Better BibTeX. The pattern is configured in ~/.crossmem/config.toml:

[cite_key]
pattern = "[auth:lower][year][shorttitle:1:nopunct]"

Syntax

A pattern is a string of tokens (inside [brackets]) and literal characters (outside brackets).

[field:modifier1:modifier2]literal_text[field2]

Tokens

Token	Description	Example output
`auth`	First author’s last name	`Vaswani`
`authors`	All authors’ last names concatenated	`VaswaniShazeer`
`year`	Publication year	`2017`
`shorttitle`	First N significant words from title (stop words filtered)	`attention`
`title`	Full title	`Attention Is All You Need`

`shorttitle` behavior

shorttitle filters out common stop words (a, an, the, is, are, was, for, of, with, …) and takes the first N remaining words. N is specified as a numeric modifier.

Example with title “Attention Is All You Need”:

[shorttitle:1] → attention
[shorttitle:3] → attentionneed (after filtering “Is”, “All”, “You”)

Modifiers

Modifiers are appended to the token with : separators and applied in order:

Modifier	Description	Example
`lower`	Lowercase	`VASWANI` → `vaswani`
`upper`	Uppercase	`vaswani` → `VASWANI`
`nopunct`	Remove all non-alphanumeric characters	`hello-world!` → `helloworld`
`condense`	Remove all whitespace	`hello world` → `helloworld`
`N` (digit)	For `shorttitle`: take first N words. For other fields: take first N whitespace-delimited words.	`[shorttitle:1]` → first significant word

Examples

Default pattern

pattern = "[auth:lower][year][shorttitle:1:nopunct]"

Paper	Generated key
Vaswani et al., “Attention Is All You Need”, 2017	`vaswani2017attention`
LeCun et al., “Deep Learning”, 2015	`lecun2015deep`

All authors

pattern = "[authors:lower][year]"

Paper	Generated key
Vaswani & Shazeer, “Attention Is All You Need”, 2017	`vaswanishazeer2017`

With literal separator

pattern = "[auth:lower]_[year]"

Paper	Generated key
Vaswani et al., 2017	`vaswani_2017`

Full title condensed

pattern = "[title:condense:lower]"

Paper	Generated key
“Attention Is All You Need”	`attentionisallyouneed`

Multi-word short title

pattern = "[auth:lower][year][shorttitle:3:nopunct]"

Paper	Generated key
Vaswani et al., “Attention Is All You Need”, 2017	`vaswani2017attentionneed`

Collision resolution

If a generated key collides with an existing entry, crossmem appends a suffix:

Try a through z: vaswani2017attention → vaswani2017attentiona
If all 26 letters exhausted, append _<count>: vaswani2017attention_27

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