Citation restrictions ===================== The rigid restrictions on the allowed characters in a `citation label` (e.g. [Doe2006]_) prevent commonly used label styles (numbers, Author:year, havard). The citation labels do not conform to the style requested in most scientific journals.. Workarounds =========== A proposed workaround is using citation reference syntax within a `substitution reference`. (As convention, not enforced by reST.) Havard style citation references are by name and year. Depending on the context, they take the form: As |[Doe2007]_| pointed out, ... This is also summarized in |p[Doe2007]_|. The formatting of the references_ list could be done without use of the citation element. The citation for the following reference is formatted using the field list element. |[Doe2010]_| updated his view ... This would be a "currently working workaround". References ---------- (The references section should ultimatively be inserted by a "Docutils Citation Preprocessor" that parses the text for citation references and looks them up in a bibliographic database.) .. [Doe2006] Doe, John, *A Useful Article*, *2006* .. |[Doe2007]_| replace:: `Doe (2007)`_ .. _`Doe (2007)`: [Doe-2007]_ .. |p[Doe2007]_| replace:: `(Doe 2007)`_ .. _`(Doe 2007)`: [Doe-2007]_ .. [Doe-2007] Doe, John, `Summary Article`, *2007* .. |[Doe2010]_| replace:: `Doe (2010)`_ :_`Doe (2010)`: Doe, John, `Update of Article`, *2010* Problems ======== #. Label substitution only occures in the citation reference. The citation label in the References_ section is not substituted and therefore does not match the label in the text. #. `Phrase references` would lift the restrictions on the allowed characters in a label. However, even with `phrase references` for citations, the square brackets around the Label in the References_ list violate the Havard style. #. There is no backlink from the citation to the citation reference in the examples with substituted citation label. (Do we need this? How is the case of multiple references to a common citation handled?) #. While a "true" citation is converted to html as:: [Doe2006] the substitution reference containing a citation references becomes:: Doe (2007) so that it is not marked as a citation reference. (Missing logical markup preventing, e.g., a special layout by CSS stylesheets.) The "currently working workaround" misses the logical markup even for the citation definition. (I suppose the docutils document tree will not count the `citation reference in a substitution reference` as `citation reference` either. Even if the citation and substitution operations are orthogonal, oder does matter as it determines the order in the document tree.)