Where do you place your links?
I wanted to see what ideas people had for how to include links in their zettels, for those of us who do it fully digitally.
Do you:
- Include the links as footnotes?
- Add the links to the end of the explanatory paragraph?
- Use markdown syntax to include the link seamlessly into the main body of the text?
What are the different pros and cons of each method?
Currently I do number two but I wanted to see if others had any other thoughts or preferences.
Thanks!
Howdy, Stranger!
Comments
For quite a long period I approached my Zettelkasten as a rigid structure dictated by a set of predefined rules. This may have stemmed from my tendency to see and yearn for structure in almost everything.
Anyway, as I have spent more time with my notes, I have started to play with the "construct" more flexibly. Sometimes the links find their place in footnotes, sometimes they are at the end of a paragraph. And when it feels right, they are embedded into the body of the text. Every now and then they are just a great mess of unorganised leftovers from unfinished thinking process.
Gradually I have been shifting from a method-oriented mindset to a goal-oriented one. The freedom from strict rules has opened up something which I must call creativity
I'm sure I will find myself tweaking the links in the future as well, but less compulsively.
Maybe my answer isn't exactly what you were looking for but I hope it still offers you some perspective.
As you are doing your PhD, you know everything you need to know about linking! A link is an internal reference. Place it exactly like you'd place an external reference.
I am a Zettler
Thank you very much for your insight! I think that a general acceptance that personalisation is fine, actually, would be good for my broader producivitiy. Ultimately rules are useful if they stop things getting too unwieldy to use, but letting the system breathe and be organic is a worthwhile feature on its own/
A good point, I hadn't considered them like that. It might help to neaten up my notes to have them listed together with the external references.
I use Google docs for my ZK which lets me paste the url for links at the bottom of my zettel. (I paste links for my internal references, and use Zotero for the external ones). Just one more example to consider!
I'm pretty flexible on this and have placed links at different locations in my notes. But my most common usage is the last one listed above.
That is my practice for zettels. For formal documents, I put them where they are expected (usually in footnotes or endnotes).
For me, I place them in the bottom References section of the Zettels. If I actually use them as a reference, it goes through my citation manager, gets a proper citation that I reference (as simple as reddit2025ca), and it of course downloads an offline copy for me. Most reference managers have a browser plugin that'll make that easy for you.
However, I've found that copy-pasting links, lists of links etc. into Zettels is VERY nice for research, especially for starting and stopping. This kind of thing is an excellent artifact to come back later. For example if a source provides links, if I found something that might be interesting, etc. I just keep them in the relevant Zettel at the Reference section, with checkmark syntax to be able to mark them as seen.
Also a big thing for my workflow: if I do one of those browser-binge-with-50-tabs, I'll paste the interesting ones in a dedicated note ("Research into Rohrschach - Interesting Follow-Ups?"). I think of those link lists as embroyonial Key Question/Structure/Hub Notes.
This is a part where my Zettelkasten blurs a bit with the rest of my PKM, task and project managements, where I also keep link lists. If you want to see it from the Ahrens Orthodox view, that would be transient Project Notes.
I'd recommend not actively pasting links in the main body of the note, as depending on what you want to do with the text it can be detrimental. For example if you compose a longer text with Zettels as a basis and your workflow is to copy paste everything into a new document. That's why I also refreain from in-note footnotes (which will get lost) and backlinks (which'll error out), and only use "naked" (La)Tex citations (like this: [@schmidt2025|).
In my method, my notes have two other kinds of notes they are related to, so I have two linking methods:
Here's an example. The words algorithm and recursion each have their own specifically-related note, so there is a hyperlink directly on the word. At the bottom, the notes for Counting Operations and Counting Steps are linked in a general way.
This works well for me, as I want to know just by looking at my note how the linked notes are related to it.
@PPainter Adding a P.S. to my previous comment. Currently, I am writing a document that will be published both as a paper book and as an ebook. Short references are included in the body of the text, while longer references are included in footnotes. Most references are hyperlinked, for the convenience of the ebook reader. However, it is important to ensure that all references are complete without the hyperlink, so that the paper book reader can follow them. This might seem obvious, but I found on editing the book that this required attention.