[O] contributing to work on citations

[Matt Price]

So, from the "some projects" thread I have the sense there is a group of users with some interest in improving citation support. What is the best way to kickstart that process? it seems to me that, at a minimum, the following is needed:

1. Finalization of the citation syntax.

IIUC, This involves refining and merging the work in the wip-cite git branch.

2. Choice of a citation creation tool

IIUC, the two main candidates are pandoc-citeproc and citeproc-js/node.  Pandoc-citeproc works well but requires users to install the whole pandoc infrastructure, and needs to be wrapped in a thin tool for use with org.  Citeproc-node has fewer dependencies (I guess), but needs to be updated to support additional output formats (e.g. latex, odt, and org) and is a little more elaborate to run from the command line (runs as a service, can only be communicated with over http).

3. Handling of citation links in the various export engines

Functions must be written to handle citations in, at minimum, latex, html, and org

4. Interface with backends

Org should be able to talk to bibtex and zotero databases, at least (and maybe more). 

A lot of this work has already been done. Richard has written org-citeproc as a wrapper for pandoc-citeproc https://github.com/wyleyr/org-citeproc . Aaron has written some functions for org-citeproc in the wip-cite-awe branch. Nicolas has developed the syntax in wip-cite. I even have a fork of citeproc-node that could be used to develop the missing features we need.  And of course John has org-ref (http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu/blog/2014/05/13/Using-org-ref-for-citations-and-references/) while Erik H has zotxt-emacs for Zotero integration (https://github.com/egh/zotxt-emacs).

What would be the best next move? It seems to me there are enough moving parts that the process will be quite a bit easier if we co-ordinate.

thanks,

Matt