Re: Org citations, CSL and citeproc-el

["András Simonyi" <andras.simonyi@gmail.com>]

Dear All,

thanks a lot for the helpful responses!

Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu> wrote:
> I don't know if you are aware, but we had discussed the possibility
  > of building something like this on the list a few years back. [...]
  > And here is how I summarized the state of that discussion in June:
  > https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2015-06/msg00426.html
  > The upshot was that we came to agreement on quite a few points about what
  > citation syntax should look like, and those points have been implemented in Org
  > syntax in the wip-cite branch of the Org repo.

I found some of the discussion, but not your summary and the
cite-related branches -- these are very useful.

  > 1) BibLaTeX support.
  > 2) org-bibtex support.

I'll have to look into BibLaTeX more but I suspect that both of these
should be doable relatively easily on the basis of the already existing
(albeit by no means complete) BibTeX support in citeproc-el. I'll create
corresponding enhancement issues in the github repo. A related thought:
was there any initiative to create something like org-bibtex but for CSL
bibliography descriptions? It could be an interesting alternative to
citeproc-YAML (see
http://blog.martinfenner.org/2013/07/30/citeproc-yaml-for-bibliographies/).

I've checked the citation/cite syntax in the wip-cite branch and it
seems to be a good starting point for trying to use citeproc-el to
render the citations. As a first step I could simply abstract away the
syntax and add a switch in citeproc-orgref to choose between the org-ref
and the the org-mode citation syntax (as it is in the wip-cite branch),
without touching other parts of the code. Currently citation rendering
is done (following org-ref's citeproc) by means of the
`org-export-before-parsing-hook' -- all citations are replaced with
their rendered versions before parsing. I'm not familiar enough with
org-mode's internals to assess how hackish this solution is, maybe there
is a much better way. One thing to consider is that I need all citations
together with their positional information (order, footnote number etc.)
for rendering in order to deal with disambiguation, ibid. forms etc.

Another question is the syntax for specifying the bibliography to be
used and, maybe, the location where the bibliography should be placed.
Org-ref (ab)uses links for these purposes as well. Was there a syntax
proposal for these things too?

Christian Moe <mail@christianmoe.com> wrote:
  > Not many people liked my proposal: a link-based syntax similar to yours
  > but also including author and date in the link description. The idea was
  > to have descriptions that are both (1) human-readable even though the
  > citekeys are hidden away in the link path and (2) machine-readable to
  > determine the form of the citation (parenthetical or not, date-only or
  > not, etc.).

This is an interesting proposal -- I like the idea of human readable
citations in the unexported org-mode documents but I'm not sure what
would be the best way to achieve them. citeproc-el can render isolated
references on the fly so they could be perhaps used as tool-tips or
overlays? Another difficulty I see is the generation of this added
information -- would it be automatic? What happens if the author or the
year is missing, or is ambiguous etc. If I could get hold of your parser
then perhaps this could also be added as an alternative citation syntax
in citeproc-orgref. Another option could be to normalize the keys to a
disambiguated author-year format, but this would modify the bibliography
file which is not necessarily a good idea...

thanks again and best regards,

András