Cite Format

Cite Format is an intuitive way of accurately and exhaustively describing the arrangement of source information within citations. Here's an example APA book format:

^AUTHOR. (YEAR). <i>TITLE</i> (TRANSLATOR,+Trans.) . EDITOR,+Ed(s). LOCATION: PUBLISHER.

This defines output citations of the form:

• Chomsky, Noam. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1969). Genealogy of Morals (Walter Kaufmann, Trans.). Random House.

Syntax

There are 5 syntactic categories:

1. boundaries: spaces ( ) and backslashes ( \ )
2. modifiers: carets ( ^ ), tildes ( ~ ), and bars ( | )
3. fields: uppercase strings of 3+ uppercase letters ( AUTHOR ), plus modifiers
4. punctuation: any combination of: ,.:[]()"'
5. extras: arbitrary strings, with whitespace represented by plus ( + ) symbols

There are 3 rules of composition:

1. If no boundary intervenes among n elements, they're attached.
2. Fields do not attach to one other.
3. Modifiers must attach to a field.

On attachment

An element is said to be attached to a field if no boundaries intervene between the field and the element. In the below, the extras (HTML tags) and the punctuation are attached to the TITLE field:

<i>(TITLE).</i>

In the next case, the parentheses attach to the ISSUE field, and not to the VOLUME or PAGENUMBERS fields, since a backslash (a boundary) intervenes on the left, and a space (a boundary) intervenes on the right.

VOLUME\(ISSUE). PAGENUMBERS.

Semantics

Field interpolation and modifiers

Fields are replaced with strings; AUTHOR becomes Noam Chomsky.

If a caret appears at the left edge of a name field†, the (alphabetically) first name will appear inverted. So, ^AUTHOR becomes Chomsky, Noam.

If a tilde appears at the left edge of a name field†, all first names will be dropped, and if more than 2 names, names 2+ will be replaced by et al.

The bar modifier turns n fields into a single disjoint field, in which the leftmost non-empty value replaces the whole field. So AUTHOR|EDITOR will be replaced by the value of AUTHOR if defined, or else with the value of EDITOR.

Attachment

Elements attached to an empty field are dropped. So then, if FIELDA evaluates as 'Chomsky', and FIELDB evaluates as empty:

# Attached period
FIELDA FIELDB.  # = 'Chomsky'

# Un-attached period
FIELDA FIELDB . # = 'Chomsky.'

In the first case, the attached period vanishes because FIELDB is empty, while in the second case, the un-attached period remains. The same applies for extras.

Punctuation filter

The output will satisfy the following:

• Empty enclosing punctuation ( "" '' () [] ) is dropped.
• Bad periods ( .. (. [. ) are dropped.
• Bad commas ( ,, ,. (, [, :, ,) ,] ) are dropped.
• Bad colons ( :: :. (: [: ,: :) :] ) are dropped.