Design question: a citation field with page numbers

Question

I have a “citation” field for my “article” record, an article may refer to several citations, e.g. Book A, p.57 and Book B, p.327.
Obviously I also have a “Books” table with book name and published year, author etc.
But I don’t know how to associate “page number” easily with the selected book. Must I create another table linking Article, Book and page number? This would be the obvious way in traditional database design and you would create a UI to simplify the book/page number selection. However in Airtable it would be a multi-step process for the user: select Citation field, create Add+, select the book, add page number, then close the book-page record, then close again. Could this process be simplified so the user only has to select the book and add page number in one action?

gwynn_kruger · Accepted Answer

Try removing the Citation field from Article and instead make it a table:

Your user needs to specify the books in a separate table and then specify the articles. Once those are done you add your citations for each article. It should be a decent user experience especially considering the copy-and-paste features of the grid.

You could also create another view to group by articles:

Y_K · Answer

Try removing the Citation field from Article and instead make it a table:

Your user needs to specify the books in a separate table and then specify the articles. Once those are done you add your citations for each article. It should be a decent user experience especially considering the copy-and-paste features of the grid.

You could also create another view to group by articles:

Thanks – that’s actually what I have done (create the citation table linking the other two tables) but the user has difficulties adding an association. I guess this is the only way unless I design an external UI to help simplify the data input.
Thanks for the answer!

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