[Feature Request] List all places a link (e.g. a figure or citation) is referenced

[hwangy]

I'm really enjoying sioyek so far, thanks for all of the great work. One feature that's missing in all other PDF browsers I've used is the ability to see (or jump through, e.g. with the "n" key) all the places where a figure or citation (for instance) is referenced. This would be really useful, especially in papers where the references are using the numeric citations (rather than the alpha citation style), since in this case, it's not practical to search through all places where, for instance "3" is used in the PDF (one could search [3], but this misses when 3 is referenced alongside other references).

Is there a systematic way of doing this given the PDF metadata? Or is type of backwards search not feasible.

Thanks!

[ahrm]

This is not currently possible though it is an interesting feature and I may add it at a future version. We do have regex_search support which maybe can be used to emulate this somewhat.

Out of curiosity, what is your use-case for this feature (knowing the exact use case might help me design the feature better).

[hwangy]

That would be great!

I'm a researcher, so often when looking at an academic paper, I search on Google scholar for other papers which cite the current paper (paper A). But any paper B which cites A could be using it at a surface level (e.g. in the literature review) or directly used in the results of paper B. So having this function would make it easier to quickly search B for where results from A are used.

Most of the time in my area, people use alphabetic citations, e.g. like "[GL23]" so I can just search for "GL23" in paper B. But especially in older papers, the references are of the form "[2]", and in that case it's not possible to easily get a sense for where citation [2] is used in the paper. I think regex search could help here, e.g. via "[([^\s])2([^\s])]". But having this functionality (using the papers built in links) could be useful for generalization to other citation styles. Also, this would be useful for other use-cases like, if there's a key Theorem in a paper, easily seeing where the Theorem is used. This again could be accomplished via regex, but having a more general solution would be great.