Knitcitations Updates

Used some down-time while traveling to hammer out a long overdue update to my knitcitations package.

My first task inovled a backwards-compatible update fixing a few minor issues (see NEWS) and providing pandoc style inline citations v0.6-2, on CRAN.

I followed this with a ground-up rewrite, as I summarize in NEWS:

v1.0-1

This version is a ground-up rewrite of knitcitations, providing a more powerful interface while also streamlining the back end, mostly by relying more on external libraries for knitty gritty. While an effort has been made to preserve the most common uses, some lesser-used functions or function arguments have been significantly altered or removed. Bug reports greatly appreciated.

  • citet/citep now accept more options. In addition to the four previously supported options (DOI, URL, bibentry or bibkey (of a previously cited work)), these now accept a plain text query (used in a CrossRef Search), or a path to a PDF file (which attempts metadata extraction).

  • Citation key generation is now handled internally, and cannot be configured just by providing a named argument to citet/citep.

  • The cite function is replaced by bib_metadata. This function takes any argument to citet/citep as before (including the new arguments), see docs.

  • Linked inline citations now use the configuration: cite_options(style="markdown", hyperlink="to.doc") provides a link to the DOI or URL of the document, using markdown format.

  • Support for cito and tooltip have been removed. These may be restored at a later date. (The earlier implementation did not appropriately abstract the use of these features from the style/formatting of printing the citation, making generalization hard.

  • bibliography now includes CSL support directly for entries with a DOI using the style= argument. No need to provide a CSL file itself, just the name of the journal (or rather, the name of the corresponding csl file: full journal name, all lower case, spaces as dashes). See https://github.com/cboettig/knitcitations/issues/38

  • bibliography formatting has otherwise been completely rewritten, and no longer uses print_markdown, print_html, and print_rdfa methods. rdfa is no longer available, and other formats are controlled through cite_options. For formal publication pandoc mode is recommended instead of bibliography.

This version was developed on a separate branch (v1), and has only just been merged back into master. CRAN doesn’t like getting multiple updates in the same month or so, but hopefully waiting a bit longer will give users and I a chance to shake out bugs anway. Meanwhile grab it from github with:

devtools::install_github("cboettig/knitcitations@v1")

You can see this package in use, for instance, in providing dynamic citations for my RNeXML mansucript draft.