Claude Vault Citations

Ask questions about your Obsidian vault and get back answers with verified citations to the exact notes and passages that support each claim — powered by Anthropic's Citations API.

Most "chat with your notes" plugins paste your notes into a prompt and hope the model attributes its claims correctly. This one uses Claude's first-class citations support, so every cited passage is a guaranteed pointer back to a real chunk of your vault.

What makes it different

• Real citations, not hallucinated ones. Citations come from Anthropic's native API, not from a prompt asking the model to "include sources." cited_text is guaranteed to come from your notes.
• Click a citation, jump to the note. Each inline citation pill is a link to the source note at the cited paragraph.
• Prompt caching. Large note context is cached on Anthropic's side, so follow-up questions in the same session are cheaper and faster.
• Granular by paragraph. Notes are chunked into paragraph blocks before being sent, so citations land on the right passage — not the whole file.
• Stays in your vault. Your Anthropic API key is stored locally in the vault's plugin data. Only the top-ranked notes for a given question are sent to Anthropic.

Install

From the community plugins browser (after submission is approved)

1. Settings → Community plugins → Browse → search for "Claude Vault Citations"
2. Install → Enable
3. Open settings and paste your Anthropic API key

Manual install (now)

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Place them in <your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/claude-vault-citations/.
3. In Obsidian: Settings → Community plugins → enable Claude Vault Citations.
4. Open settings, paste your API key from console.anthropic.com.

Use

• Click the quote icon in the left ribbon, or run Claude Vault Citations: Open chat from the command palette.
• Type a question. The plugin ranks your notes against the question (BM25), sends the top-N as document blocks with citations enabled, and renders the response with clickable citation pills.
• Select text in any note → run Ask Claude using current selection to seed a question.
• ⌘/Ctrl-Enter sends.

Settings

Setting	Default	Notes
Model	claude-sonnet-4-6	Opus 4.7 / Sonnet 4.6 / Haiku 4.5. Citations are supported on all current models.
Max response tokens	2048
Max notes per question	12	More notes = better recall, higher cost
Max characters per note	8000	≈ 2000 tokens; long notes are trimmed
Include / exclude folders	exclude: .trash,.obsidian,templates	Comma-separated paths
Prompt caching	on	Cache the largest document block per request
System prompt	(research-assistant default)	Editable

How it works

1. Retrieve. Your question is tokenized and scored against every markdown file in scope using BM25 with a small title boost.
2. Chunk. Each candidate note is split into paragraph blocks (code fences kept intact). Blocks are sent as a custom content document so the model can cite at paragraph granularity.
3. Ask. The notes are sent to Claude as document content blocks with citations.enabled: true. The last (largest) document gets cache_control: ephemeral so subsequent questions in the session are cheaper.
4. Render. Response text blocks are rendered inline. Each one with a content_block_location citation gets a clickable pill that jumps to the right note at the right line.

Privacy

• Your API key is stored locally in <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/claude-vault-citations/data.json.
• For each question, only the top-N notes matched by BM25 are sent to Anthropic. Nothing else leaves your vault.
• Anthropic's Citations docs state that the citations feature is eligible for Zero Data Retention if your org has a ZDR arrangement.

Development

git clone https://github.com/nord342/obsidian-claude-citations
cd obsidian-claude-citations
npm install
npm run dev      # esbuild watch mode
npm run build    # production bundle

Symlink the repo into <your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/claude-vault-citations/ to develop against a real vault.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.