Bibliography and org-mode Some title Some title Some title

Problem

Org-cite – a new way of handling citations appeared in Org 9.6. This approach was to be built-in org it seems to be promising and future technique for handling bibliography. I was encouraged to try it after reading this links:

• https://orgmode.org/manual/Citations.html
• https://kristofferbalintona.me/posts/202206141852/
• https://github.com/jkitchin/org-ref
• https://blog.tecosaur.com/tmio/2021-07-31-citations.html#fn.3
• https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/71817/how-to-export-bibliographies-with-org-mode
• https://www.reddit.com/r/orgmode/comments/vchefn/guide_to_citations_in_orgmode/

So I decided to use is it instead of spending my time on configuring venerable org-ref.

The problem appeared soon because it turned out in my Emacs distribution (Debian Bullseye’s Emacs 27.1) the built-in org version was 9.3. First, I tried to install oc files downloaded from here:

https://git.entf.net/dotemacs/files.html https://git.entf.net/dotemacs/file/elpa/org-9.5/oc-natbib.el.html https://git.entf.net/dotemacs/file/elpa/org-9.5/oc.el.html

spent several hours on fighting with that and… didn’t succeed.

Finally I was enlighted and decided not to struggle with org 0.3 but just upgrade it. That went a bit easier, however not without problems. (see the post “Problems with Emacs 27.1 and org 9.6”).

Anyway I finally managed to have org-cite working with my Emacs.

How to use org-cite?

So now handling citations (with “basic” export method) is realy as easy as it is described in manual.

The only thing to remember is that you may need to explicitely load oc package in your init file ((require 'oc)).

Assuming we have a bib file like this:

@article{a1,
  title = {Art 1},
  author = {Author, A.},
  year = {1997},
  month = jul,
  journal = {journal},
  volume = {20},
  number = {1},
  pages = {51--61},
}

@article{a2,
 title = {Art 2},
 author = {Author, B.},
 year = {1997},
 month = jul,
 journal = {journal},
 volume = {20},
 number = {1},
 pages = {51--61},
}

we can attach it to org-mode document like this:

#+TITLE: Some title
#+AUTHOR: Some author
#+LATEX_CLASS: article
#+CITE_EXPORT: basic
#+BIBLIOGRAPHY: biblio.bib 


* Basic exporter

This is the text. These are citations
[cite:@a1], [cite:@a2].

When many items  are to be produced in one list,
one needs to separate them with semi-colon:
[cite: @a1; @a2]

** Bibliography
#+PRINT_BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Inserting items is done via org-cite-insert command, binded by default to C-c C-x @. Then you need to confirm selected list by C-M-j keystroke (solution found here).

Other exporters

#+TITLE: Some title
#+AUTHOR: Some author
#+LATEX_CLASS: article
#+CITE_EXPORT: biblatex
#+BIBLIOGRAPHY: biblio.bib 


* Biblatex exporter

This is the text. These are citations
[cite:@a1], [cite:@a2].

When many items  are to be produced in one list,
one needs to separate them with semi-colon:
[cite: @a1; @a2]

** Bibliography
#+PRINT_BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Important remark!

The exporter won’t work properly if there are problems with the .bib file itself. For example, (that was my case) duplicate items won’t let org-cite to end the job. It is signalized with warnings in BibTeX validation errors buffer which displays bibtex-validate messages.

After getting rid of duplicates org-cite worked ok.

[DEPRECATED description] Problem

How to write in org and use bibliography files? New, simple and universal way of management of bibliography appeared quite recently in Emacs. It’s described in the following links: org-man, author’s blog, stackexchange post.

There are some problems with it on my Debian Bullseye. Probably it’s too new to work out of the box. It seems that it was introduced in Org 9.6, and Org 9.6 it too new for Emacs from Bullseye repositories.

These problems were described in previous post and are mentioned here, here and here.

Since I don’t have time to deal with all those troubles I decided to give up this apprach for now. I’m going to come back again when all those teething problems are solved in the next versions of org and emacs…

Solution

For now I decided to use some simple workaround. Assuming we have a bib file like this:

@article{a1,
  title = {Art 1},
  author = {Author, A.},
  year = {1997},
  month = jul,
  journal = {journal},
  volume = {20},
  number = {1},
  pages = {51--61},
}

@article{a2,
 title = {Art 2},
 author = {Author, B.},
 year = {1997},
 month = jul,
 journal = {journal},
 volume = {20},
 number = {1},
 pages = {51--61},
}

we can attach it to org-mode document like this:

#+TITLE: Some title
#+AUTHOR: Some author
#+LATEX_CLASS: article      
#+BIBLIOGRAPHY: biblio.bib 

* Chapter 1
This is the text. \cite{a1}, \cite{a2}

\bibliography{biblio}
\bibliographystyle{plain}


# ## Local Variables:
# ## eval: (require 'oc-bibtex)
# ## End: