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

[Max Nikulin <manikulin@gmail.com>]

On 28/03/2022 20:16, Bruce D'Arcus wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 28, 2022 at 8:37 AM Max Nikulin wrote:
>>
>> John, in another message (Sun, 27 Mar 2022 13:00:40 -0400)
>> https://list.orgmode.org/m24k3jnq0k.fsf@andrew.cmu.edu you clearly
>> stated a technical limitation that is a real reason why org-cite is not
>> an option for you and for some other users: performance has not been
>> optimized for large BibTeX databases. It is deserved to be mentioned.
> 
> FWIW, Ihor posted a patch related to this a week or so ago.

I am optimistic concerning that patch since a couple of users confirmed 
improvement, but it is up to John to decide if it is acceptable in 
comparison to org-ref. I am unsure concerning startup time.

>> 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.

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).

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 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.

> "Year" would be much less portable. That doesn't mean that "year"
> couldn't be legitimate, in the sense of "I really need the year here".

I would say that if a citation style has no year than a warning should 
be spat, but year should not appear since it is against the style. 
Unsure if it is useful to have special command or style "query" that can 
insert e.g. year, journal, or any other field disregarding style to 
ensure that the text and the bibliography reference have not diverged, 
but it is rather for descriptive text than for a citation.

> But that raises another question: How will citeproc-el know where this
> year is coming from, and how the year has to be formatted? That will
> have to be hardcoded in the processor as styles contain no information
> about this.

A fallback style (for the particular citation, for the whole document or 
in global user preferences) might be specified for formatters missed in 
the main style.

I have tried the following:

obt.bib:
@ARTICLE{schawlow1958iao,
   author = {Schawlow, Arthur Leonard and Townes, Charles Hard},
   title = {Infrared and Optical Masers},
   journal = {Phys. Rev.},
   year = {1958},
   volume = {112},
   pages = {1940--1949},
   month = {Dec},
   doi = {10.1103/PhysRev.112.1940},
   issue = {6},
   publisher = {American Physical Society},
}

obt.org:
#+bibliography: obt.bib
# #+cite_export: csl
# #+cite_export: csl 
/usr/share/citation-style-language/styles/chicago-author-date.csl
# #+cite_export: csl 
/usr/share/citation-style-language/styles/american-physics-society.csl
- Default: [cite:@schawlow1958iao].
- text: [cite/text:@schawlow1958iao].
- noauthor: [cite/noauthor:@schawlow1958iao].
- year/bare: [cite/year/bare:@schawlow1958iao].

#+print_bibliography:

I am familiar with bst language used by BibTeX and I am surprised that 
initials instead of full names are not enforced by CSL styles. Emphasis 
and bold markers may appear in plain text export. Behavior of styles is 
not uniform in respect to adding (unbreakable?) space before citation.