Reference Slugs

This is an idea I've been trying out, again in the vein of doing writing
in manageable smaller tasks and reducing the mental mode switching that
makes things take so much concentration. Especially looking up the details
of what is said in a reference when I'm trying to write can throw me off
(even sometimes remembering the format for a citation). So the idea of a
reference slug is that to dispose of a paper you want to cite, you open
your reference slug file and add the citation in the proper format, then
*write the sentence that will contain that citation* around it. Examples:

As Cazelles and Stone (2003) demonstrated, a cross-correlation will fail to show a coupling in cases where the phases are synchronized but the amplitudes are uncorrelated.

For instance an fMRI study by Amedi, Malach, Hendler, Peled and Zohary (2001) concluded that an area considered to be strictly visual, the lateral occipital complex, also responds to touch, and so should be considered a multimodal object-related network rather than a visual area.

The normalized Shannon entropy was used (Cazelles & Stone 2003; Le van Quyen et al. 2001; Tass et al. 1998), a measure which gives a score of 0 to a perfectly flat distribution and 1 to a distribution where only one bin has any contents and the others are empty.

This way you don't have to keep going back to look up the details of what
they did and what they concluded. You don't ever have to look at that
paper again for the project. And you end up with a lot of the volume of
your paper written, which is encouraging (of course the actual words of
the slug could change a lot once you slot it into its proper place - the
important thing is that it have the *maximum* amount of detail you might
want).

This seems to be a very complimentary approach to writing a ropebridge: a
ropebridge is like writing from the outside in - gliding over it all then
filling it in more later - while working on reference slugs, and growing
the text out from them, is like writing from the inside out. And best of
all, you can do a ropebridge and reference slugs more or less
independently, and they use different parts of your brain. Draft 0 is when
you try to shove them together.

So far I've put all my reference slugs for a particular paper in one big
file, and if there get to be so many that it's hard to find the one I want
I start to roughly organize them by topic. Better yet, by what order
they'll come in in the paper.

Why "slug"? I don't know. That's just the word that came into my head for
them. Maybe it's because they're long and lumpy, like slugs? Or have a
certain heft to them, like a slug of metal? I'm open to alternative
suggestions for the name.