With the new plugin for BibTeX import announced in the TW pre-release, I 
would like to suggest a referencing plugin. I don’t have the knowledge and 
resources to develop it myself, but I can offer suggestions and testing for 
what I think would be a valuable contribution to TW for research and 
academic publishing purposes.

The BibTeX import creates tiddlers with title = citationKey and writes all 
data entries into fields. A referencing plugin would provide two main 
functions: a) in-text citation and b) insertion of a bibliography/works 
cited list; both functions would ideally be configurable according to 
different academic style conventions with – again: ideally – the 
possibility to customise or add new styles.

a) In-text citation

The two main styles of in-text citation used in academic texts are 
footnotes and inline citation. The latter usually consists of an entry like 
"(Author Year: Page)", without the quotation marks. A TW reference could 
usefully look like a macro `<<cite source:'citationKey' page:'54' 
style:'APA' format:'([field:bibtex-author] [field:bibtex-year]: 
[page])'>>`. (I don’t really know whether this notation is correct.) All 
parameters except source would be optional, style and format should be 
globally configurable. Style could take options like `APA`, `MLA`, 
`Chicago` and the like, or `FN` for footnotes. An autocomplete option for 
the citationKey or an easy preview would be cool.

The HTML output should be a in a `CITE` element with a fixed CSS class that 
can be manipulated if necessary.

b) Bibliography

A `<<bibliography>>` macro should collect all `<<cite>>` entries and 
generate a customisable list of the respective bibliographical entries, 
either as footnotes with preceding numbers in the order they appear in the 
text, or as works cited list sorted by author name. The entries need to 
conform to the globally configured style, or to a custom format. Parsing 
BibTeX data into a correct bibliographical entry can be fairly involved but 
I would hope that solutions for this already exist (Zotero.org has xml 
style templates which could be used or serve as inspiration).

It would be useful if the bibliography can be inserted anywhere, so the 
macro should take a parameter `<<bibliography tiddler:'tiddlerName'>>`.

Useful configuration options for the bibliography macro (overriding global 
style settings) would be:

* Number of author names to display in full before et al. abbreviation is 
used [integer].
* Provide links for online sources (if available) [boolean].
* First names initialised instead of displayed in full [boolean].
* Force use of title case for publication titles (regardless of BibTeX 
data) [boolean]. (This would need another parser.)

The HTML output should be nested in a `DIV` element with a fixed CSS class 
that can be manipulated if necessary.

I’d be interested in any comments.

Thanks for reading!
Tyll

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