Re: pandoc/citeproc issues: multiple bibliographies, nocite, citeonly

[John MacFarlane <fiddlosopher-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>]

+++ Nathan Gass [Nov 22 10 17:02 ]:
> On 21.11.10 22:46, Bruce wrote:
> >
> >
> >On Nov 21, 2:32 pm, John MacFarlane<fiddlosop...-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>  wrote:
> >>Currently pandoc inserts the list of works cited at the end
> >>of the document.  (You can provide a label like
> >>
> >>     # References
> >>
> >>at the end if you like; the references will be placed after
> >>this.)
> >>
> >>This doesn't offer much flexibility. In particular:
> >>
> >>(1)  The writer doesn't know which part is a bibliography and
> >>can't style it differently or even offer the option to do so through
> >>CSS, etc.  (Unlike the footnotes...)
> >>
> >>(2)  You can't choose not to include the works cited.
> >>
> >>(3)  You can't have per-section bibliographies in your document;
> >>the bibliography only comes at the very end, even if you've got
> >>a long book.
> >>
> >>(4) There's currently no way to include items you didn't cite,
> >>or suppress items you did cite.
> >
> >There's another issue that will inevitably come up, so I should
> >mention it now:
> >
> >(5) You can't have multiple sections per bibliography. Common use case
> >is you need a section for legal cases, another for primary documents,
> >and a third (which we might call default) of the secondary academic
> >literature.
> >
> >I believe there are one or more LaTeX packages that support this sort
> >of thing, but I don't recall their solution. And IIRC, discussion
> >around this in the CSL world has tended to center around bib groups,
> >where you might optionally assign references to a named group, which
> >would correspond to an equivalent names section.
> 
> As I understand the common use case, the section a reference belongs
> into is given by the type of the reference? So this info could
> actually be encoded in the bibliography? Pandoc then only needs a
> way to add all needed bibliography sections, and not a way to mark
> references belonging to a specific section. How individual are this
> sections named? I ask this because currently I consider attaching
> the bibliographic info to specific named sections the best solution.
> For this to work we need to cover most/all possible names for such a
> section.
> 
> This way we don't need any new syntax to support this use case.
> Legal cases would be marked as such in the bibliography file, and
> pandoc would attach the rendered bibliographic info to a differently
> named section if it finds such a section in the text.

I'm not sure from Bruce's message whether CSL yet supports named
groups, but that seems the way to go in the future.  So the
bibliography file would say that the entry belongs to the "primary"
group, and then in your pandoc document you'd have something like:

<references filter-group="primary" />

I agree that we don't want to clutter up the actual in-document
citation syntax with syntax for groups.

John