I am a new Scrivener user. Is there a way to attach several index cards or notes to one document? For instance, if I am working on a document, can I attach a note for interviews I have to do, a separate note for the topics I want to cover, a separate note for maps and illustrations, etc? Right now, I am creating separate files for these and then linking to them via the references facility.
Since your forum tag says “Windows” and you refer to “References” (a feature which has been changed to “Bookmarks” since then), I wanted to make sure you were in the right section of the forum—the macOS tech support area?
That aside, the answer to your question is largely the same since it is a rather fundamental part of how Scrivener works: in short you are doing the right thing! I myself wouldn’t bother with making additional links or cross-references, but rather would use the hierarchical outline to make that “statement” itself. But one is free to do whatever they want.
To clarify my thinking, Scrivener is a traditional outliner, where one organises things into topical groupings using indent levels. We can easily think of this in terms of “Food/Fruit/Banana/Cavendish”. It is a very similar concept to the file system, where you can know from “Documents/MyProject/SomeFile.txt” that “SomeFile.txt” relates to the topic that is “MyProject” and is in an even larger sense a “document” that you work with. So by putting your additional notes, images and further thoughts beneath the master item, you are automatically saying that they are related. In Scrivener, we might have something like “Research/SomeLocation/Map” or “…/SomeLocation/Interview with Locals”, and so forth.
[size=80]We needn’t “say” that ryan is an interview taken at a certain location, because our hierarchy already says that.[/size]
The main difference between an outliner like Scrivener and a file system though is that anything can become a topic for another thing. You can create half a dozen text entries beneath your “Map” PDF, as individual notes about various locations within it. With file systems you can only make a “topic” with a folder.
You don’t have to create additional links because you can know this file of interviews has to do with the location it is nested under. But where a link (Reference or otherwise) might come in handy is if “Interview with Locals” is also of interest to a completely different topical grouping, or maybe even a chunk of text in the Draft folder itself, where you write. That’s the tool you want when relationships are “fuzzy” or more complicated than a simple hierarchy of topics.