Customize BibTeX key

[domoritz]

I would like to manually set the BibTeX rather than using the default key.

[hainesr]

Are you using ruby-cff directly, or are you wishing to change what GitHub uses as the key in its UI?

[domoritz]

I am using it through GitHub. In particular, I prefer the key moritz2019falcon for this BibTex entry:

@article{Moritz_Falcon_Balancing_Interactive_2019,
author = {Moritz, Dominik and Howe, Bill and Heer, Jeffrey},
doi = {10.1145/3290605},
journal = {Proceedings of the 2019 {CHI} Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - {CHI} '19},
title = {{Falcon: Balancing Interactive Latency and Resolution Sensitivity for Scalable Linked Visualizations}},
year = {2019}
}

generated from https://github.com/vega/falcon/blob/8f96b311b7b41c4c45bdf93dbede7a16b0de0285/CITATION.cff

[hainesr]

Apologies for not replying sooner.

We used to use a generic YourReferenceHere citekey, but we were asked, and it seemed sensible, to use something that could be used directly. In generating a citekey it's difficult to know exactly what to do, given that it has be robust across as many (or all!) publications. First author last name and year are obvious choices, but will clash very easily. I tried adding just the first word of the title, but this is often "the" and will again clash in a lot of cases. Any other attempt to parse out a sensible single word from the title requires human intervention really.

So what we have works very well for the general case. I think the only way that we could have people supplying their own citekey would be within the CFF itself. I'm not sure if adding that capability is sensible or of interest so I'd appreciate the thoughts of @sdruskat and @jspaaks.

[domoritz]

Since it's difficult to automatically generate a good key, I think having a way for people to override it is very important.

[hainesr]

Picking this up after a rather long gap, sorry.

As GitHub generates its citation text directly through this library from the CFF file in a repo, and the only way of configuring a citekey would then be through the CFF file itself, I suspect that this issue is for the main CFF repo. I also suspect that this request is then rather too BibTeX specific to go into CFF, but I'll transfer it anyway so that the conversation can at least happen there.

[jspaaks]

My two cents: there is no good way to automatically generate a key. Even if authors supply it, consumers might prefer a key in a different format. Hence the YourReferenceHere.

[hainesr]

I agree @jspaaks. Also, the reason we moved from YourReferenceHere to a generated citekey was to help people who needed to copy more than one CFF generated reference into a .bib file. The current citekeys should rarely clash at least.