Citation style with CSL

[jobindjohn]

Great plugin here!

Is it possible to change the citation style, for example, by specifying the CSL style file in the .yml? Would be a good feature to have!

Thank you!
Jobin

[shyamd]

Hi Jobindj,

This uses pybtex to all the bibtex heavy lifting. Unfortunately, that doesn't support using CSL style files to control the output. You're welcome to submit a patch that enables this directly to pybtex or to this repo.

[jobindjohn]

Thank you, @shyamd

[alexvoronov]

@jobindj : I am also looking for ways to use CSL styles for citations. I found a workaround: it is possible to use pandoc to add citations, before running mkdocs.

Suppose you have a file with citations ([@AuthorYear] elements) in file docs/publications-EDITME.md, and bibliography in refs.bib. The following command will create a new file docs/publications.md with fully-formatted citations according to CSL file:

pandoc docs/publications-EDITME.md --bibliography refs.bib -o docs/publications.md -t markdown-citations --csl csl/chicago-syllabus.csl

More background on StackOverflow here, here, and here.

I also found that citeproc-py can handle both CSL and Bibtex bibliographies, I'll see if I can make it to work instead of pybitex.

[alexvoronov]

Actually, I realized that it is possible to call pandoc from inside mkdocs-bibtex plugin, instead of running it separately from the command line. Pandoc might be better option than citeproc-py: citeproc-py appears to be not very robust to "slightly-broken" CSL files, while pandoc handles those CSL files without problem.

There are Python wrappers for pandoc: pypandoc and pyandoc. Both wrappers require pandoc and pandoc-citeproc to be installed on the system - an extra dependency. Citeproc-py, on the other hand, is pure Python.

[jobindjohn]

Thanks for sharing, @alexvoronov! I will give this a try 👍

[shyamd]

I'm more than happy to accept a PR to switch to pypandoc. pyandoc looks like it might not be maintained anymore