Re: citations: org-cite vs org-ref 3.0

[Denis Maier <denismaier@mailbox.org>]

Am 29.03.2022 um 18:14 schrieb Bruce D'Arcus:
> On Tue, Mar 29, 2022 at 11:23 AM Max Nikulin <manikulin@gmail.com> wrote:
> ...
> 
>>>> You even have managed to convince me that, besides adding missing style
>>>> names, some existing ones should be adjusted. noauthor/bare for citeyear
>>>> example makes for me much more sense ...
>>>
>>> This does need some attention, but there are wrinkles here.
>>>
>>> Citeyear is specific to author-date styles, while noauthor is intended
>>> to be more general.
>>
>> Anyway citation style is rather specific for a particular CSL style. I
>> tried some styles:
>> https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/blob/master/ieee.csl
>> https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/blob/master/american-physics-society.csl
>> nature.csl science.csl and for all these styles even "author" is
>> meaningless since they are numeric styles.
> 
> Yes. I think it's more relevant in author-date to note styles. I
> believe biblatex has a command relevant here, but Denis knows biblatex
> better than I.

I'm not sure I understand the question here. What command should be in 
biblatex? There's \citeauthor if that's what you've meant.

> 
>> So it is not more general. Switching CSL style means necessity to update
>> styles in each citations (unless it is possible to specify global or
>> per-cite mapping).
> 
> Not really. Arguably the most important style is "text", which applies
> to any output style; author-date, note-based, numeric.
> 
> When you start getting into some of the others, the range of styles a
> given style may apply to shrinks.
> 
> But you might say author-date styles are pretty dependent on such
> local citation modification. If those are output to a style that has
> no such notions (like a numeric one), then a processor can just ignore
> it.

Just to add to this: When Bruce and I have worked on that list of styles 
we found that portability can only be ensured when using high-level 
commands (such as biblatex's autocite), but once you start using 
low-level commands like citeyear etc. you really lose that portability 
to a certain degree.

> 
>> It seems modifiers are set of boolean flags (positive "year" or negative
>> "suppress-author") in citeproc.el, set of values in natbib, and a kind
>> of hierarchy in org-cite. From my point of view, set of constrains
>> (flags) is the most general variant in this list.
> 
> I think that's right, and is how it's represented in a GUI app like
> Zotero. But that's not so convenient in a plain text format.
> 
> But it's a good way to explain the differences.
> 
>>> I think it's probably a good idea to add "year" to the latex processors too.
>>
>> I agree. Negations are more confusing when an author needs just year.

Well, negations have the advantage of being more portable. Say you have 
this:

Doe argues X and Y [cite/noauthor:@doe].

It's perfectly clear what this should mean in a author-year, 
author-title or note-based styles, i.e., print the citation without the 
author element. (That's obviously a simplification since some citations 
might not have an author element, but let's just go with it for the moment.)

In a numeric style you can just ignore the noauthor modifier and fall 
back to the default numeric citation.

Now, consider this instead:

Doe argues X and Y [cite/year:@doe].

This might work in author-year styles, but not in author-title, not in 
note-based styles, and not in numeric styles.

Considering the problem that some citations don't have an author element 
I even considered using style names like


[cite/head:@doe]
[cite/tail:@doe]
or
[cite/car:@doe]
[cite/cdr:@doe]
or
[cite/first:@doe]
[cite/rest:@doe]

But that obviously a bit esoteric.

Denis