Front Matter

Front matter (or “metadata”) is information included in a special section at the beginning of every Markdown file–like a literature or research note–that describes various key characteristics of that file (such as its title, the date it was created, etc). All metadata in Markdown comes in the form of key-value pairs, such as:

title: "Why food systems governance is complicated"

Multiple entries under a given key should be separated by a carriage return, two spaces, and a dash like so:

author:
  - Author One
  - Author Two

Whenever you create a new Markdown file you need to add a minimal amount of front matter, depending on the type of file. This metadata goes at the very beginning of the file between two enclosing lines of three consecutive dashes: ---.

Below are some front matter templates for different types of files that you can simply copy and paste from the docs whenever you need.

Literature Notes

---
title:
author:
  - 
type: literature
year: 
tags:
  - 
  -
---

Research Notes

---
title:
author:
  - 
type: research
projects:
  - 
  -
tags:
  - 
  -
---

Working Documents

These are generally longer documents used to create reports, academic articles, and the like.

---
title:
abstract: 
author:
  - 
type: doc
projects:
  - 
  -
tags:
  - 
  -
---