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Re: [O] Should wip-cite branch be merged to master?


From: Richard Lawrence
Subject: Re: [O] Should wip-cite branch be merged to master?
Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2018 12:19:47 -0700

Hi everyone,

I don't have too much to add to this, though I do want to thank everyone for their continued interest in citations, and the work that has been done!

Since the question of syntax has come up again, I guess I want to address one point that András made:

András Simonyi <address@hidden> writes:

From the citeproc-el/CSL point of view, the current syntax is perfect with the notable exception of the provided citation commands. Currently only `cite' and `(cite)' are supported, where the latter seems to be intended to provide the parenthetical version of a basic citation, e.g. in an author-date style `cite' would produce something like `Smith 2018` while `(cite)' `(Smith 2018)'. Now I think that for author-date styles `cite' should produce the parenthetical version and that `(cite)' probably shouldn't be among the commands at all. The main reason is that most citation processors (biblatex, CSL processors etc.) support not only author-date citation styles but footnote-based ones as well, and the concept of a `parenthetical citation' doesn't really make sense for the latter.

I think this actually gets at one of the fundamental problems with citations, namely, they resist attempts to separate 'content' from 'style'. It is hard to insert citations into a document without making any assumptions about how they will be rendered by the citation processor. And so it is hard to come up with a syntax that is general enough to represent widely different citation styles, in a way that makes those assumptions explicit in the syntax of the unprocessed citation, so that the content of the citation can be separated from how it will be rendered. Thus we see the huge proliferation of different citation commands in e.g. BibLaTeX, natbib, and similar packages. András' proposal would reintroduce some of the complexity of BibLaTeX citation commands at the level of Org syntax.

Maybe having multiple citation commands is ultimately the best way to go, but I want to point out that one of the goals of the original discussion to come up with an Org syntax that is simpler and does a better job of separating content and style. Anyway, that was one of my goals in synthesizing people's various suggestions and needs into a concrete syntax proposal. I think we should try to avoid proliferation of citation commands.

If that is a reasonable goal, then I think there is really just one distinction that deserves to be represented at the level of citation commands: the distinction between 'in text' and 'parenthetical' citations, that is, the distinction between 'cite:' and '(cite):' in the current syntax in wip-cite. That brings me to this point:

A more abstract characterization which is applicable to all styles is that normally references are not part of the main text, they are set off either by brackets or in a note. Since this is the most frequent, basic form, I think this the one which should be produced by the `cite' syntax, that is, when used in normal text `cite' should produce something like `(Smith 2018)' for author-date styles and a note with the reference for note styles.

I think András' abstract characterization is exactly right: the issue here is not really about whether the citation has brackets around it. Instead, it is about whether the rendered citation is intended to be *read as part of the surrounding sentence* ('in-text'), or whether it is *grammatically independent* of the main text ('parenthetical'). I disagree, however, that 'parenthetical' citations are the normal or usual case; I think that depends completely on one's field, writing style, etc. (In my dissertation, for example, in-text citations outnumber parenthetical citations roughly 3:2.) The 'in-text' vs. 'parenthetical'/'out-of-text' distinction is really the fundamental one that you can't abstract from as an author. And it seems to me that apart from this decision, most of the other decisions about styling can handed off to the citation processor, via a choice of CSL file, at least for the out-of-text case: is it a note-based style, or a Harvard-like one? etc.

The in-text case is a little trickier because you need a way to represent the different kinds of data that might be intended to fit into the surrounding sentence (author name? year? both? just a number? etc.). But there are many many possibilities here, and for that reason I think it is better to avoid making them primitive citation commands. Instead we should just stick to one command for the in-text case, and have some extensible way to represent the data that should be rendered, e.g. maybe like

[cite: @Jones2018 :year]

or (as I think was proposed at one point):

[cite:author @Jones2018]

Again, maybe it's worth having some shortcuts here for the common cases, but I think in general we want to try to avoid proliferation of basic citation commands. So for that reason I think we should just stick with the 'cite'/'(cite)' distinction as the two basic commands, perhaps with a more extensible/compositional syntax in each case for expressing the variations on these two basic types of citation.

--
Best,
Richard

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