Re: wip-cite status question and feedback

[Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@uni-tuebingen.de>]

Hi Bruce and all,

"Bruce D'Arcus" <bdarcus@gmail.com> writes:

> Just to align what you're saying and what I'm saying:
>
> I see three commands in the pandoc syntax: standard/parenthetical,
> author-in-text, and suppress-author; that look like so:
>
> [@doe17]
> @doe17
> -@doe17
>
> Implicit in what you wrote is the last one is not needed.
>
> The question, then: Is that what you're saying; we don't need suppress-author?

Ah, no, I didn't intend it like that. I am not very familiar with the
implementation details of pandoc-citeproc and wasn't aware that
suppress-author was a different type of citation command. I was
(vaguely) thinking of the third case as a "variant" of an in-text
citation type, rather than a separate type.

Actually, the Pandoc example you give seems to support this way of
thinking about it:  

> Doe, by contrast, found negative results [-@doe17].

That is a fourth case, right? "[-@doe17]" is not equivalent to "-@doe17"?

In other words, what we have here are two orthogonal distinctions:
parenthetical vs. in-text, and normal vs. author-suppressed. So, at
least on my funny way of counting ;), that's two citation "types", with
two "variants" within each of those types.

> one of the CSL implementers (Frank Bennett) figured out how to make
> the above example an author-in-text variant, so that you don't need
> suppress-author, and the entire sentence is the citation.
>
> He did this by adding an optional "infix" variable to the citation.
>
> So in that example, you would have:
>
> - command: "author-in-text"
> - citekey: "doe17"
> - infix: "by contrast, found negative results"
>
> This is arguably an edge case, but it does relate to the question of
> whether we need two (standard and author-in-text) or three commands
> (adding the suppress-author).
>
> One could make the reasonable argument (I think, though not everyone
> would agree) that the workaround for the above example is to use
> author-in-text command but restructure the sentence:
>
> @doe17, by contrast, found negative results.
>
> From that perspective, I guess we indeed need only two commands:
> standard (parenthetical) and author-in-text.

This way of writing the sentence seems less obvious to me than the
pandoc syntax. It also has the potential disadvantage that the choice
between rendering

"Doe (2017), by contrast, found negative results"

and

"Doe, by contrast, found negative results (2017)"

now has to be made at the level of the stylesheet instead of at the
level of the sentence where that citation appears. My instinct is that
this choice is informed by individual writing style and better made at
the level of the sentence. But you probably have a better sense than I
do of whether this is something that should at least sometimes be
controlled by the stylesheet. (Are there e.g. journals that always want
in-text citations to look like the latter case? I have no idea.)

In any case, if I'm right that this choice is usually better made at the
sentence level, then I think the syntax needs to support all four cases.
.The pandoc syntax does this, and I think the suppress-author variation
is probably needed often enough that we should have something similar.

-- 
Best,
Richard