Feature Request: Include ref id for each reference#450

A member of the ICER team brought up the challenge of trying to refer to a specific reference in our Nest without having to list out Author name, year, title, etc. This can be particularly challening when a prolific Dr. Smith generates multiple papers every year (two Smith et al, 2019 papers) or is the PI on numerous drug trials.

We recall that DistillerSR granted an id to each reference, which we thought might be a really helpful feature to integrate into NK.

Thanks for describing this pain point - it’s compelling.

Behind the scenes, we do have a unique identifier for every record in your nest. We’ve chosen to keep that identifier hidden, to date. I think the key considerations here are:

1. Positioning: Where is this viewable & is it editable. I’m imagining it could be shown in our standard bibliographic data, made available as a column in inspector, and could be editable depending on item (2) below
2. Value assumed: What type of values should be used? The “behind the scenes” identifier I mentioned is not human-friendly (very large values, does not start from 1). I’m imagining you’d most want a number, starting from 1, that is incremented for each new record brought into the nest. Side note: Many of our users use the External ID field (imported from RIS) for this purpose; we might consider repurposing this field to accomodate both use cases.
3. Searchability: In order to make this field high-value, it should be rapidly searchable (e.g. a type-ahead option in inspector)

Linking to a related issue of wanting to efficiently identify records: #467

Thanks for your patience here! We added Ref IDs in release 1.66.0, which can be used for:

• Uniquely identifying records within your nest
  • In short, Ref IDs count upwards +1 for every record you import to the nest, in order. If you delete searches (and corresponding records), you may develop gaps in Ref IDs which won’t be filled in. Ref IDs only march upwards!
• Filtering / viewing in Inspector + exports
• Uploading Full Texts and Supplemental Materials in bulk

Please let us know if they’d be useful elsewhere, we went for low hanging fruit to start with!