AuthorInText citations with numeric CSL styles

[mxpiotrowski]

In contrast to author-date styles, with numeric CSL styles, there’s no difference between @Klaus1966b and [@Klaus1966b]: both produce just something like “[42]”. This makes it hard to switch between author-date and numeric styles.

I was under the impression that this was a limitation of CSL, so I wrote a Lua filter to scratch this itch. However, responding to my announcement on Mastodon, Bruce D'Arcus commented that it should work as expected, i.e., @Klaus1966b with a numeric style should produce “Klaus [42]” rather than just “[42].”

I see that a similar issue has been brought up before in #8331, although I’d just expect the behavior above rather than the more complex one described in this issue.

Is this possibly a bug in citeproc?

[jgm]

Also relevant: jgm/citeproc#131

[jgm]

It's been a while since I've thought about this, but I suspect the problem is the following. citeproc would need to extract the atuhor name. But how should it be presented? CSL has a whole host of different settings that affect how author names are formatted (initials or not? et al or not, and and what stage? etc.). With author-date citation styles the style is already telling you how to format the author names, and we just need to extract this. With numerical styles we'd have to...make something up, I guess.

I also seem to recall many people wanting this to work like: "1 says blah blah [2; 3]."

I'd be happy to get @bdarcus feedback, though.

[jgm]

Some more even more ancient references for completeness:

jgm/pandoc-citeproc#209 (comment)
jgm/pandoc-citeproc#125
jgm/pandoc-citeproc#133

[mxpiotrowski]

Thanks for your reply and the references!

So it seems that I wasn't completely wrong when I wrote the filter, as I couldn't see a way to do it with CSL. I agree, the “correct” rendering of an in-text numeric citation can’t easily be inferred from the style—it’s likely different from the bibliography.

I guess a filter then actually might be the best solution. In fact, it should be quite simple to use a template for customizing the rendering.

[bdarcus]

Yeah, I didn't think about the "how to render the author?" question. May need to wait for a solution in CSL proper.