Handling different reference types

[kamicut]

Supporting multiple reference types in the form manager requires us to study different approaches and assess each approach's complexity.

The current citation-js library does a good job of processing bibtex and giving us all the elements we need to create citations and bibliographies. With an automatic approach like https://runkit.com/kamicut/citation-agu-example that allows us to use custom styles, we can output the bibliography or citations in AGU style.

Using Bibtex uploads allows us to get any valid user input from an external reference manager and process it within APT. However, we had different possibilities for the existing form. @batpad @wrynearson @danielfdsilva and I discussed and came up with a few ideas:

1. Remove the reference manager form, only allowing bibtex upload (preferred)
2. Expanded reference manager form to support more types of references (not preferred, much more difficult)
3. Don’t change anything (not preferred, easiest, many problems for users)

Remove Form

This is our preferred approach, as it allows users to manage the references in an external application (like Zotero), and importing them directly in a valid bibtex file. We would then process the file and search for duplicates and have a strategy for de-duplication.

Expand the form

This is a much bigger task then supporting only uploads, since we would have to support more types of references inside APT and we would have to figure out a user process for dealing with managing references potentially inside and outside of APT. We recommend inserting all new references through bibtex and only using the form for editing, however this could lead to data getting out of sync.

Not changing anything

This requires us to document what works / doesn't work in the current process and letting users know the limitations of the current reference manager.

[wrynearson]

Sorry @bwbaker1, we forgot to tag you, so you may not have seen this context about references.

[bwbaker1]

@wrynearson Thanks for discussing this with the team!

For clarification, idea 1 (Remove the reference manager form, only allowing bibtex upload) would require users to re-upload the entire Bibtex file if new references are added?

Idea 2 (expand form) is not an option before our 1-year maintenance period.

[bwbaker1]

@wrynearson Another question related to the bibtex re-upload. If a user adds new references to their previously uploaded bibtex file, and the references are sorted differently, will this break the in-text citation links?

Odds are that the references will not be sorted the same upon the re-upload.

[wrynearson]

Hi @bwbaker1, what do you mean by sorting? The order of the references in the bibliography?

In the BibTeX standard, there is a unique identifier for each reference in the file, so we could use that to determine which references are new and which are existing/modified.

[bwbaker1]

@wrynearson Yeah, I was referring to the order of the references.

That's great. We were concerned that if the references were ordered differently upon re-upload that it would break the existing links to the in-text citations.