Re: State of the art in citations

[Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu>]

Hi Clément and all,

Clément B. <clement@autistici.org> writes:

> As for citations, I find that the most flexible way is to define
> my own link types, that allows control on both org formatting and
> export...

Replacing my inline \cite commands with custom link types is something
I've been meaning to do for a while.  Thanks for the implementation
ideas!  

I have a setup that for some people may complement the one Clément
describes.  Rather than dealing with .bib files and RefTeX, I represent
my bibliography in Org, and use org-bibtex to (re-)generate a .bib file
as needed.  Here's how it works, in brief; I described it more fully at:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/79016/

1) I store each reading as a TODO headline using a capture template.  I
use the post-capture hook to call org-bibtex-create-in-current-entry as
appropriate.  This allows me to keep notes, links, deadlines
etc. associated with each reading in Org, as well as the bibliographic
data.

2) I have a function that uses org-map-entries to walk over the
headlines for my readings and export them to a .bib file.  This
regenerates my .bib file on an as-needed basis; the real bibliographic
database is stored in Org.  (I call this function from a Makefile, but
it could just as easily be used from within the Org export process.)

The next step, which I haven't yet implemented but which would connect
this setup to one like Clément described, would be to add behavior to
the custom link types so that *following* the link would jump to the
associated TODO entry for the reading, rather than the entry in the .bib
file.  This should be straightforward, since org-bibtex uses the
CUSTOM_ID property to store the cite key.  And jumping to my own notes
about a reference (which might further link to the original text),
rather than to a .bib file, is usually what I want.

-- 
Best,
Richard