Post References

This is a package of React components to create citations for your blog posts. It works best with MDX and static site generators.

npm -i @pilvit/post-references

Motivation

Many blog posts use links to their references, but this doesn't work with well scientific literature or books. Another approach is to use <cite> HTML built-in tag, it is good if you refer to a licensed content.

In our approach you can define citation style and the respective bibliography is printed and citation formatted. The format is inspired from BibTex. The numbering is automatic, and items are sorted by author names.

Example in MDX

---
title: Example Post
---

Lorem lipsum... <Cite id="sicp" meta="p. 20–25" />

More text <Cite id="tex" /> here...

<Bibliography data={{
    sicp: {
        type: "book",
        title: "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs",
        authors: ["Harold Abelson", "Gerald Jay Sussman", "Julie Sussman"],
        year: 1985,
        publisher: "MIT Press"
    },
    tex: {
        type: "web",
        title: "TeX",
        authors: ["Wikipedia"],
        link: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX"
    }
}}/>

In static-site generators such as Gatsby and Next.js you can define a template:

import {Bibliography, Cite, CiteContextProvider} from "@pilvit/post-references";
import {DefaultRenderer} from "@pilvit/post-references/renderers/DefaultRenderer";
import {defaultCiteFormatter} from "@pilvit/post-references/renderers/defaultCiteFormatter";

export const Template = () => {
    return (
        <CiteContextProvider>
            <MDXProvider components={{
                Cite,
                Bibliography
            }}>
                {/* MDXRenderer */}
            </MDXProvider>
        </CiteContextProvider>
    )
}

By default, it adds the cite-link class to Cite component and bibliography to Bibliography for custom styles. You can also create a higher-order-component to supply your custom class.

Writing bibliography

Article

There are many kind of scientific articles such as conference and journal articles.

{
    type: "article",
    title: "Literate Programming",
    authors: ["Donald E. Knuth"],
    year: 1984,
    journal: {
        name: "The Computer Journal",
        issue: 2,
        volume: 27,
        pages: [97, 111],
    },
    doi: "https://doi.org/10.1093/comjnl/27.2.97",
}

Book

{
    type: "book",
    title: "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs",
    authors: [
        "Harold Abelson",
        "Gerald Jay Sussman",
        "Julie Sussman"
    ],
    year: 1985,
    publisher: "MIT Press"
}

Websites

{
    type: "web",
    title: "TeX",
    authors: ["Wikipedia"],
    link: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX"
}

Citation Styles

There exists many academic citation styles such as IEEE. Different disciplines use different ones.

Default

The default style doesn't expect a scientific convention to be used, so a plain variation of ACM is used.

| Type | Bibliography | Citation | |---------|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|------------| | Article | [1] John Doe. 2021. The Example Article. The Journal, Volume 1, Issue 3, Pages 1–10. DOI: https://doi.org/... | [1] | | Book | [2] Jane Doe. 2022. Example Book. Publisher. | [2, p. 20] | | Web | [3] Wikipedia. Node.js. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Node.js. | [3] |

Custom

You can choose any supported style to render by passing the renderers or use a custom one e.g. if you have a custom style for _ACM, you would write

<CiteContextProvider citeFormatter={acmCiteFormatter} BibItemRenderer={ACMItemRenderer}/>

Item renderers must implement BibItemProps interface and cite formatters CiteFormatter interface, see the type definitions.