Numbered and alphabetically ordered citations

[rowanc1]

From @drscotthawley:

Seeing all the author names & years becomes a cumbersome eyesore when you're citing a lot of different papers in the course of a (introductory) paragraph. More compact numerical citation markers are strongly preferred for some of our use cases. :-)

I think that this would be a "site" template configuration (although I suppose it could be project/page level). Currently this is dealt with totally in the renderer/template.

Actions:

• [ ] Decide on where in the config this should go
• [ ] Look to other examples for naming of this configuration option so that we are close/in-family to existing tools.

@drscotthawley if you have experience with this in other tools, I would love some help in the research side. From an implementation perspective this should be pretty easy -- just want to think through what the config options are called, and if we want any other citation like config while we are at it.

[drscotthawley]

@rowanc1 Agreed! A "site-wide" style would suit my needs as well, e.g. something in the YAML front matter. I notice that when I export to latex & PDF using the arxiv-twocolumn template, I do get numbered citations. But I would also like them for the website version. So whether that's done via some {cite:n} or a global option, I don't care. :-)

[eurunuela]

It would be great if the front matter had options to for instance order references alphabetically.

[alcrene]

I happened upon this thread by accident today and thought I could add my 2 cents based on what I’ve seen in research practice:

• The citation style is always preserved throughout a document, therefore it makes sense to have it as a global option.
• The citation style is almost always prescribed by the journal, therefore semantically it makes the most sense to set this in the templates.
  • Pragmatically, people are not just writing full-fledged papers targeted at journals with packaged templates, but also class notes, reports, etc. Most often the workflow will be to pick a close-enough template, and tweak it as necessary. For such cases, I think it makes sense to allow setting the citation style to be overridden by a document option, e.g. in the header.
• The MyST roles {cite:p} and {cite:t} are consistent with the equivalent roles/commands in sphinx-cite and natbib. Especially natbib AFAIK is still considered good (best?) practice and is used in official journal templates (such as those in the Physical Review family). Consistency with it is a Good Thing™, both because it makes MyST easier to learn / port to, but also because we know that the feature set of natbib is very mature. I think therefore that if new citation roles are to be introduced, they should line up with equivalent natbib commands. And if natbib does not contain equivalent commands, that should be considered strong indications that the role is probably not needed and may be detrimental.