Re: Citations, continued

[tsd@tsdye.com (Thomas S. Dye)]

John Kitchin <jkitchin@andrew.cmu.edu> writes:

>> Can you (or Tom, or someone else) make the case that it is important
>> enough to have multicites that non-LaTeX backends should support them
>> out of the box?  (I'm not doubting it, I just don't have any idea why
>> since I don't use them myself.)
>
> My case is that if this is not supported out of the box, we could not
> use the citation syntax for any of our scientific publishing needs.  In
> a recently published paper we had four citations with 4 references in
> it, four with three references, 10 with two references and 15 single
> citations. That is probably typical in our work, and in review work it
> is common to have even more than four references in a citation. This is
> a feature of modern publications because of tools like Endnote, zotero,
> etc... which make it trivial to add citations, and independent of the
> ultimate format (which is usually pdf, but sometimes html, and sometimes
> Word).
>
> If the new syntax allows us to handle citations the way links do today,
> I can see a transition pathway to the new syntax. If not, I doubt it can
> be adopted for scientific writing if you need two syntaxes for
> citations. There are other, important types of writing this may support,
> and maybe it makes sense to have separate approaches.

My experience echoes John's--many citations in my archaeology work refer
to multiple objects.  However, this was possible in bibtex.  The problem
solved by multicites in biblatex is that they make it possible to
associate a pre-note and a post-note to each object in a citation with
multiple objects.  This is often useful in author-date styles, but it is
absolutely essential in the footnote styles used in the humanities.  In
history, for example, citation practice differs substantially from the
sciences.  Scientists tend to use fine-grained citations to support
specific statements.  Historians tend to make a paragraph-long argument
which ends in a footnote that might look something like this "1. For the
popularity of pork in eighteenth century England see Foo 1923, Bar 1946,
and references therein; animal husbandry in Oceania is discussed at
length by Baz 1963."

I don't know what word-processing (document preparation) software is
prevalent in history or the humanities generally, though my guess is
Word, not LaTeX.

All the best,
Tom

-- 
Thomas S. Dye
http://www.tsdye.com