Handling Citations

[jacopouggeri]

Greetings everyone,

When considering the citation management for Fern, several methods present themselves for discussion.

• The usage of traditional Bib files, similar to many current academic tools
• Employing newer data structures like JSON or YAML
• Adopting the proven BibTeX system from LaTeX, which is already a respected standard in academia

An additional point of reflection is whether to closely mirror the established practices of LaTeX, given its widespread acceptance and efficiency in academic writing.

Please share your thoughts on these options or introduce any other recommendations. Your participation will help shape Fern's future direction. Thank you for joining in on this discussion!

[jacopouggeri]

For now, I decided to handle citations using yaml. The data structure is

doe2022:
  authors:
    - "Jane Doe"
    - "Albert Poe"
  title: "LaTeX and Modern Tools"
  journal: "Computing and Writing"
  year: 2022
  volume: 15
  issue: 2
  pages: "75-89"
  publisher: "Tech Publishers"

Which can be easily converted to and from a .bib file using a parser, although existing ones might use slightly different conventions.

Citation styles can be selected in the front matter of the article's markdown content as

---
# Other data
citationStyle: "apa" # "apa", "mla"
---

and will cause Hugo to select the appropriate partial from /partials/<style>/, which contains a intext.html for in-text citations and a biblio.html for the bibliography at the end of the article. Citing also works dynamically, and only works that have been cited intext using the cite shortcode {{ < cite doe22 >}} will appear in the bibliography. Right now nocite mode is not possible, but it could be easy to implement.

A similar implementation with partials could also be used to handle referencing figures and tables. Here, the power of fern can really shine as the in text reference or citation can be easily accessed with a click by using ids, and the content can be highlighted nicely with some css: check it out!

Note: Dynamic citations right now use Scratch, which is a mechanism for Hugo to save some data while building the site. Since builds are cached, Scratch will only be populated the first time the site is loaded, hence, during testing, they will only appear after running hugo server --disableFastRender.