The universal citekey generator from Papers 2 and Papers 3 tries to generate unique letters for the citekey in a deterministic and consistent way using the title or the doi.
For example, consider the paper below:
Nick Bostrom, Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?, The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 53, Issue 211, April 2003, Pages 243–255, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9213.00309
Using the universal citekey generator we get the following citekeys:
Universal Citekey From DOI: Bostrom:2003bq
Universal Citekey From Title: Bostrom:2003tn
The first one uses the DOI and the second one uses the title to generate the citekey. Actually, the last two letters are unique and built in a deterministic way. This way, they are consistent across users and are independent of the order in which the articles were added.
We can find the code in javascript here:
Thus, this functionality, besides being useful for allowing a desirable standardization of the citekeys, is easy to be implemented, since there is a code already ready and available for this.