Working with Bibliography in R Markdown and LaTeX

When creating documents in R Markdown, it’s common to include bibliographies to cite sources. However, sometimes you might want to display additional information from the bibliography, such as notes or access dates. In this post, we’ll explore how to force R Markdown/LaTeX to display these “note” fields in the bibliography.

Understanding Bibliography and Citation Styles

In LaTeX, a citation style is used to format citations and bibliographies. There are many different styles available, each with its own set of options and settings. The citation style determines how the citations will be displayed in your document.

For example, you might use the elsevier-harvard.csl citation style, which is commonly used for academic papers. This style includes options to display notes or access dates in the bibliography.

Creating a Custom Citation Style

To customize the citation style and include the “note” field, we’ll need to create a new citation style using the citation styles editor. The editor.citationstyles.org/visualEditor/ URL provides a web-based interface for creating custom citation styles.

1. Create a New Citation Style: Load the elsevier-harvard.csl style into the citation styles editor, and then click on “New Style” to create a new style.
2. Configure the Note Field: In the new style, add a new node for the “note” field under the bibliography layout section. Set the type of this node to “variable” and select the variable name “note”. This will allow us to display the note field in the bibliography.

Creating the Custom Citation Style File

After configuring the note field in the citation styles editor, we can download the custom citation style file as a .css file. Save this file with a name like elsevier-harvard-with-titles-with-notes.csl.

Using the Custom Citation Style in R Markdown

To use our custom citation style in an R Markdown document, we’ll need to add the following line to the header of our document:

csl: elsevier-harvard-with-titles-with-notes.csl

This tells LaTeX to use our custom citation style.

Displaying Notes in the Bibliography

Now that we’ve customized the citation style and added the note field, let’s see how it looks in the bibliography. In our sample .bib file, we can add a new entry with the “note” field:

@misc{XYZ,
    author = "Somebody",
    note = "Accessed: 2017-01-10",
    title = "{Global database of LaTeX}",
    url = "http://writeInLatex.com",
    year = "2016"
}

When we compile the document using LaTeX, the bibliography should now include the note field.

Example Output

Here’s an example of what the bibliography might look like in our custom citation style:

Somebody, 2016. Global database of LaTeX. Accessed: 2017-01-10

As you can see, the note field has been successfully displayed in the bibliography.

Conclusion

Displaying notes or access dates in bibliographies can be a useful feature for certain types of documents. By creating a custom citation style using the citation styles editor and modifying our .bib file, we’ve learned how to force R Markdown/LaTeX to display these fields in the bibliography.

Remember that this approach assumes you’re using LaTeX as your rendering engine for R Markdown documents. If you prefer to use HTML instead, you might not be able to achieve the same level of customization.

In any case, I hope this tutorial has provided a useful starting point for customizing your citation styles and creating bibliographies with notes or access dates in R Markdown/LaTeX documents.

Last modified on 2023-07-20