Export only a single ID from the database

[languitar]

I can't find any documentation how to do that: But, similar to the workflow with bibtex, I would like to define my data one, with multiple entries, and generate HTML at different places in my document for individual entries. Is this possible?

[larsgw]

This is not possible with a single Cite instance at the moment. You could possibly do something like this: (can't test right now)

const entries = new Cite(bibtex)

for (let entry of entries) {
  const html = (new Cite(entry)).get(options)
  // add html to document
}

I am planning to improve the output of Cite, including the CSL part, because the current output options scheme doesn't lend itself to operations like this in my opinion.

[jczerwinski]

I'm running into this issue as well, for exactly the same use case.

Could you maybe provide a few hints about how I might get started with this and I'll see if I can contribute?

[larsgw]

Hi @jczerwinski, thanks for your interest in contributing! I'm in the process of moving a lot of the code to a lerna repo at citation-js/citation-js; this GitHub repository and the npm package will remain for backwards compatibility, as a preset of plugins, and for browser builds. Therefore contributions won't be incorporated at the moment (but will later).

Here's my ideas on how to solve this:

Exporting one or a few entries could be handled either when exporting, or earlier in a separate, manual stage. If it's done at the exporting level, there either need to be general options (2) or the option needs to be re-implemented in each output format (1). Since the idea is that those formats are extendable now, that may not be the best way to go. A Cite instance method taking an ID or a list of IDs and returning a new Cite instance with only those entries would be the easiest, I think (3).

1. Output format code is in the following packages:

   • plugin-bibtex
   • plugin-csl
   • plugin-ris

2. General options would be handled in Cite/get.js. If you want to change that, we need to discuss more, because there would be some breaking changes.

3. A new Cite method like subset/filter would be a new file in this directory.

Which option do you think would be best? Or do you have a different idea?

[jczerwinski]

Maybe I'll specify the way I see the use case first, because I actually think that it's already pretty well supported.

Suppose we already have a Cite instance loaded up with a bunch of entries. Let's think of this instance as a bibliography:

let bibliography = new Cite();
// Load it up...
references.forEach(ref => bibliography.add(ref));

It's pretty easy to output the entire bibliography:

bibliography.format('bibliography');

It also often works to output a single (or subset of) citation(s) from the bibliography:

bibliography.format('citation', {
  entry: ['1']
});
// Prints '[1]'

The only problem I've noticed is when the citation style you're using uses citation numbers in its citation format:

bibliography.format('citation', {
  template: 'ieee',
  entry: ['3']
});
// This prints '[1]' instead of '[3]'

Basically, the citation number/order is lost.

Unless I'm missing something, other than this, exporting single citations seems to work pretty good, at least for citeproc generated output.

A couple of tweaks to [get/modules/csl/citation.js] seems to fix this without breaking anything. I just submitted a PR to this effect. Feedback is welcome!

[Brand2]

Hi @larsgw, was wondering if you had made any progress on this or know if there is a workaround for the issue where if you were to do say:

const bib = new Cite()
refs.forEach((v) => bib.add(v))
bib.format('citation', {template: 'vancouver', entry: ['2']})
// Prints (1) instead of (2)

It results in the wrong number? This seems to be consistent for numbered styles. I realise I could probably do a workaround where I do a regex replace with the number I know it should be (or something similar), but that's obviously not ideal.

[larsgw]

I haven't implemented it for anything other than in-text citations yet. In your case the problem is that using entry removes all the context, in this case the fact that there's another reference that comes before it. I think I can work on it later this week.

[larsgw]

entry now works for bibliography output as well. It also has the asEntryArray option which returns an array of id-ref pairs.