Annotating reference lists

[cgreene]

It would be valuable to allow authors to annotate selected references within the reference list with additional text. Certain journals require this (for an example, see reference 25 in this article). This could also allow authors to one day incorporate unstructured or structured metadata around the reason for that reference (used method, complementary lines of evidence, etc).

[dhimmel]

Here's a screenshot of what the reference commentaries look like in the article @cgreene mentions:

[dhimmel]

Regarding comment notes for references, I think this is a feature whose scope is more within the purview of Pandoc rather than Manubot. I don't believe Pandoc has this feature.

I'm assuming you may need the feature for a review you're writing? My recommendation would be to create a section before references like:

## Reference notes

Regarding @doi:10.1117/12.2503576:
The authors describe the main constituents of big data analytics architectures in healthcare.
The main layers of such systems (i.e. data sources, aggregation, analysis, exploration, and governance) are discussed.
Moreover, the authors identify five potential benefits (capabilities) of big data analytics by rigorously analyzing 26 big data implementation cases in healthcare.

Regarding @10.1371/journal.pbio.1002195:
In this landmark article, authors compare genomics with other domains generating Big Data, namely astronomy and social media.
The growth in data acquisition, storage, analysis capabilities, and distribution is projected in the next decade revealing a rapid exascale growth of genomic data.

This is a pretty easy way to implement a similar feature, with the caveat that the references are not directly in the reference list (but above). If you need them directly in the reference list for submission, you could do this manually, or we could write a little javascript utility to relocate them upon loading the HTML. Does this seem like a good solution, absent support by pandoc?

This could also allow authors to one day incorporate unstructured or structured metadata around the reason for that reference

IMO, fot this use case it's more appropriate to provide this information on a per citation level than per reference level. For example, Other studies have found similar results[@doi:10/XXX, confirms finding in rats]`. Pandoc citeproc supports the citation suffix syntax above, which I imagine is the preferred way to do this.