Re: org-ref in action

[Matt Lundin <mdl@imapmail.org>]

Grant Rettke <gcr@wisdomandwonder.com> writes:

> On Thu, Jun 26, 2014 at 9:08 AM, Matt Lundin <mdl@imapmail.org> wrote:
>> I think the key in any possible feature merge is to remember citation
>> management is idiosyncratic.
>
> Off topic:
>
> How do people choose today?
>
> Why choose bibtex over biblatex?

Thanks to inertia, bibtex still has a number of users in the sciences,
since it was originally designed for scientific citations. In the
humanities, however, bibtex is a non-starter, since biblatex offers much
more flexibility. The good news is that bibtex and biblatex use the same
database format, so it's easy to transition from bibtex to biblatex.
However, there are other options, such as CSL.[1]

> Where do people discuss such questions like this in real life?

I'm not sure I understand your question. Could you clarify?

I simply meant that everyone will have a different workflow/system for
storing and managing citations. E.g., some will prefer to store
bibliographical data in a zotero database, others in a single bib file,
others in multiple bib files, others as properties in org headlines,
etc.

I think one can make a conception distinction here between citation
management (i.e., how one stores bibliographical data) and citation
processing (i.e., the software one uses to export that data to some
output format). There are many, many formats (mods, bib, etc.) and tools
(biber, bibtex, csl/citeproc, etc.) for formatting bibliographical data.

In an ideal world, one should be able to 1) process bibliographical data
from multiple formats; 2) choose from hundreds of citation styles; and
3) format citations for multiple backends. I am not suggesting that
org-mode should directly support all these things, but its default
methods of handling citations should not get in the way of using
external tools that provide such flexibility.

For instance, pandoc (an immensely impressive piece of software!)
accepts bibliographical data from numerous sources and processes it for
multiple outputs (html, plain text, docx, rtf, etc.). By contrast,
ox-bibtex.el runs citations through bibtex2html, which is pretty much
limited to the "old-fashioned" bibtex formats. Ironically, ox-bibtex.el
invokes pandoc to convert from html to plain text, but only after it has
already used bibtex2html to process the data.

Best,
Matt

Footnotes:

[1] Citation Style Language - http://citationstyles.org/