jekyll-refs

Project status: tweaking a proof of concept, help appreciated

Bibliographic references in RDFa using the cito vocabulary and the bibo ontology

This makes sure you can write papers, blog posts or books in HTML using jekyll to generate the references for you by describing the references once in a JSON-LD file.

Installing it

1. Add the contents of the _plugins folder (more specifically refs.rb) in your own _plugins folder.
2. In your _data folder, add a file called references.json. This file will be a JSON-LD file that adheres to the bibo ontology. Follow the example from this repository as a specific profile/JSON structure is expected.

Using it

Citing something

1. Make sure it's correctly described in your _data/references.json file
2. Add a citation to a chunk of text using start_citation (sc in short) and end_citation (ec in short). Starting the citation takes two arguments: the cito citation type and the URI of the document also used in the references file

   {% sc cites https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180 %}comma-separated values{% ec %}
   

Create a references list

At e.g., the end of your document, you can have a list of references that were referred in the page. Include it as follows:

{% references %}

It will also add a <h2>References</h2> title.

Using CSS styles to mark-up the citations

Protip 1: hide references on the Web, show them in print

References are great when you print a page, yet on the Web, we can just follow the link instead of having to read where it comes from. You can thus hide every [x] that is created after a citation and hide the references list:

@media screen, handheld {
    .reference {
        display: none;
    }
    
    .references {
        display: none;
    }
}

Protip 2: Nice references list for print

Make sure page breaks happen at the right location, and adds a gray color to the references itself. As we use a definitions list (<dd> and <dt>), this can be shown in a nicer way as well, just like an LNCS or ACM paper.

Feel free to tweak this example:

/* References */
.references {
    color: gray;
}

.references dd {
    page-break-before: avoid;
}

.references dt {
    page-break-after: avoid;
}

.references dd span {
    page-break-before: avoid;
}

.references dt {
    display: inline-block;
    float: left;
    width: 17px;
    text-align: right;
    page-break-after: avoid;
    clear: none;
}

.references dd {
    margin: 0 0 0 33px;
    padding: 0 0 0.35em 0;
}

Protip 3: give your different type of citations a different style

E.g., when you disagree with something, but the reference ([x]) in gray so it becomes less visible.

.reference .disagreesWith {
    color: gray;
}

Example

In the _sites folder you will find a compiled version of how we see you could use this references libary.

The source file for this is in index.html. Try the example yourself with jekyll serve.