APA formatting of citations

[Claudia Holland]

Hello,

A colleague pointed out to me that the application of APA formatting to saved citations in a profile is not accurate, when the list is generated. Could you work on this, please?

Thanks,

Claudia Holland
George Mason University
rpm.gmu.edu

[Howard Ding]

Hi,

I can give a little bit of background from a development perspective. I spent a little bit of time working on this in the past without satisfactory resolution.

The citation formatting in Bibapp is based on a Ruby code library called citeproc.rb (which is a processor for CSL, i.e. Citation Style Language, which allows specification of how citations should be formatted for various standards), which isn't actively maintained and was never really complete in the first place.

To the best of my knowledge the best processor for CSL is a Javascript library. Theoretically one should be able to use one of the javascript interpreters embeddable in ruby to use this library to do the style formatting. However, I was unable to get it to work with any of them. It might also be possible to return information to the browser in the right format and then let the browser's javascript engine do the work, but I didn't investigate that possibility.

A third option would be to run the javascript code under something like node.js as a separate service (ala the Solr service bundled with Bibapp) and format citations that way. I'm fairly confident that this could happen without much difficulty (although I don't remember now whether I tried it or not), but it would add another moving piece and some dependencies that people running a Bibapp would have to deal with. It might be possible to bundle these as is done with Solr, though.

I don't think it's worth the time to try to fix up citeproc.rb given the existence of the javascript library. I do think it's worth doing one of the above to make citations in place of using citeproc.rb  - and note that you get not only APA but basically any format for which someone has written the CSL stylesheet (and there are a lot of them).

I'd be happy to know what people who are using or administering a Bibapp think.

Howard
hdi...@illinois.edu

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