Grav Bibliography Plugin

Reads a Bibliography-file (.json) with academic references and renders it as footnotes at the end of the page. Allows for a variety of styles and languages using CSL.

Uses Citeproc-PHP for parsing and formatting. JSON is a more reliable format than Bibtex, Ris, and EndNote, and conversion to it should be possible with most modern bibliography managers (eg. Zotero).

Installation and Configuration

1. Download the zip version of this repository and unzip it under /your/site/grav/user/plugins.
2. Rename the folder to bibliography.

You should now have all the plugin files under

/your/site/grav/user/plugins/bibliography

The plugin is enabled by default, and can be disabled by copying user/plugins/bibliography/bibliography.yaml into user/config/plugins/bibliography.yaml and setting enabled: false.

Markdown Extra must be enabled in your Grav-config (system.yaml) for footnotes to function. That is, it should look like this:

pages:
  markdown:
    extra: true

Usage

In the plugin's settings, use the upload-field to add any bibliography-files. These are stored in /user/data/bibliography, and can be selected in the Admin-interface under the Options tab, or set manually with a FrontMatter-variable, like so:

---
title: Home
bibliography: citations.json
---

Or whatever you named the file that was uploaded. For example, using this example as citations.json, with the default options, returns this:

[^ITEM-1]: Knuth, D. E. (1998). Digital Typography. Center for the Study of Language and Information.
[^ITEM-2]: Friedl, J. E. F. (2006). Mastering Regular Expressions (3rd ed.). O'Reilly Media.
[^ITEM-3]: Sprowl, J. A. (1975). The Westlaw System: A Different Approach to Computer-Assisted Legal Research. Jurimetrics Journal, 16, 142. Retrieved from http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/juraba16&id=152&div=&collection=journals
[^ITEM-4]: Jarvis, R. M. (2008). John B. West: Founder of the West Publishing Company. American Journal Of Legal History, 50(1), 1-22. http://doi.org/10.2307/25664481

You reference these by their identifier, for example [^ITEM-1] (see Markdown Extra), and a link to the citation will be inserted in your text. From the way Markdown is parsed, only referenced citations are shown.

Options

FrontMatter key	Default	Description
bibliography		Filename of a bibliography file, for example citations.json, set on a page-level.
enabled	true	true to enable the plugin, false to disable it.
bibliography_style	"apa-5th-edition"	Style to use for formatting citations, must match a .csl-file in /vendor/citation-style-language/styles-distribution.
bibliography_lang	"en-US"	Language to use for formatting citations, must match a .xml-file in /vendor/citation-style-language/locales.

The included style and locale are only the defaults, and more can be installed into /your/site/grav/user/plugins/bibliography/vendor/citation-style-language. Locale-files go into ... /vendor/citation-style-language/locales and styles go into ... /vendor/citation-style-language/styles-distribution, and are available from here and here, respectively.

Caveats

Performance may be slow on initial load with a large bibliography, but if cached the impact is negligible - it is just a bunch Markdown returned as HTML. Some simple tests, using Grav v1.1.3:

References	Time	Filesize
4	107.54ms	2.43 KB
59	395.03ms	33.8 KB
100	885.29ms	58.4 KB
1000	3.45s	581 KB
10.000	49.66s	5.69 MB

These numbers are the time needed by the plugin to read and render a JSON-file with a bibliography, and do not represent the load impact on a live, cached site. If developing with the Debugger enabled, the Bibliography-rendering is logged into the Timeline.

MIT License 2018-2023 by Ole Vik.