[pmwiki-users] Bibliographies

christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com
Mon Sep 11 14:08:49 CDT 2006


On Mon, 11 Sep 2006, Tom Backer Johnsen wrote:

> >> What do you mean by "... displays a correctly formatted citation"?
> >> I would expect that clicking the link would "move" me to the corresponding 
> >> entry in the bibliography?
> > 
> > I meant:
> > 
> > - (:cite unique-ref-id:) generates a link to the reference at 
> >   unique-ref-id
> > 
> > - it displays as (using anchor markup for illustration)
> > 
> >   [[#unique-ref-id | Hawking et al. (2005)]]
> > 
> >   *not* [[#unique-ref-id | unique-ref-id]]
> > 
> >   in other words, it displays in the body a suitable piece of text,
> >   retrieved from the actual reference

Ok, that makes sense. And the bibliography style determines if the text 
will be something like "[1]" or "Hawking et al. (2005)".

> > - clicking the link displays the full reference, in the author's chosen
> >   style

Hmm... when you say "displays the full reference".. Do you mean that the 
browser goes to the corresponding place in the bibliography, or that some 
kind of popup is shown with the full reference information?

> > I may have the terminology wrong here. I tend to refer to 'cite' in 
> > the body of the text and 'reference' in the bibliography. So I meant 
> > 'a correctly formatted citation' to refer to how the unique-ref-id is 
> > rendered in the body of the page and 'suitably formatted reference' to 
> > refer to how the details are presented in the bibliography.
> > 
> > Please correct me if that is not the right usage.
> 
> I think that is the correct usage, at least according to the Endnote 
> manual which defines a citation as: "bibliographic information in the 
> body of a paper that refers the reader to a complete reference in the 
> bibliography"

Hmm... I thought the above was correct, but then I googled for 
"define:citation" and most definitions say that the citation is actually 
the information that uniquely identifies the source. This would typically 
be an entry in a bibliography. Wikipedia also agrees with this definition:

	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation

although it does say that

	The word citation may be used of the act of citing a work as well 
	as to a reference itself.

So I'm not sure that the Endnote manual is correct... In fact I just feel 
more confused. We do however need some terminology in order to know what 
we are talking about. 

<snip>
> > In general terms, the $XMLFooterFmt (= & $HTMLFooterFmt) variable can
> > be used, I think to control bibliography placement, by translating the
> > (:bibliography:) markup to generate the appropriate entry.
> > 
> > Interestingly, I think this will be easier to do in the published PDF
> > than in the html page.

Yeah, I think so too :-)

> >> It's interesting that the concept of a bibliography gets more 
> >> challenging in a wiki setting. For instance, we will probably want a 
> >> bibliography to list citations occuring in more than just the current 
> >> wiki page. This means that the directive that produces the 
> >> bibliography also needs to know which pages to produce the 
> >> bibliography for.
> >>
> >> I'm guessing (:pagelist:) will be our friend here...
>
> > In publishing a pdf, LaTeX takes care of this, I believe, but you are 
> > right there is an issue in HTML. I had envisaged that the markup rule 
> > that handles (:cite:) would build the bibliography in a php static 
> > array, then the markup rule that handles (:bibliography:) would sort 
> > the static array into the specified order and insert it into the 
> > $XMLFooter. Since (:cite:) has to read the bib page to retrieve the 
> > text to use in the link, it may as well grab the entire reference.

This works, assuming that the bibliography is on the same page as all the 
(:cite:)-commands.

OTOH, if the bibliography (the actual list) is supposed to be on a 
separate page, I guess we need to somehow be able to tell the bibliography 
directive what pages it should search for (:cite:).

> > I believe there is another slight wrinkle: sometime you want to 
> > include an item in the bibliography without explicitly referring to it 
> > in the body. We may need a (:nocite unique-ref-is:) which says 
> > 'include this in the bibliography but don't display anything'.
> 
> Really?  I've never encountered such a thing, or at least I do not think 
> so.

I've used it a few times. Using these LaTeX commands

	\bibliographystyle{unsrt}
	\nocite{*}
	\bibliography{mybib}

you can get a complete listing of your bibliography database - nicely 
formatted the way you like it. I am pretty sure we would like to be able 
to do something similar.

<snip>

> To begin, with I would be happy with:
> 
> - One single BibTex file for the site, named in say config.php

Eh... why not a wiki page containing the information?

> - A simple citation command, like (:cite unique-ref-id) as mentioned 
> above which would either be rendered in number format, e.g. [11] 
> alternatively (controlled as an option) as (Authorlist PubYear), e.g. 
> (Cohen, 1968),
> - A list of the cited references at the end of the page

Yeah, this sounds like a good starting point - it would solve many of my 
needs at least. 

/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr


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