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Support cross-document citation

Open xu-cheng opened this issue 4 years ago • 3 comments

Sometimes, it would be very helpful to be able to reference a citation in another document such that they share the same citation key. There are packages like xr and xcite for this purpose. However, it only supports traditional BibTeX. I wonder if it is possible to support the same feature in biblatex.

xu-cheng avatar May 22 '21 04:05 xu-cheng

There have been a few questions about that on TeX.SX: https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/426964/35864, https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/473444/35864 and maybe linked questions. While in certain situations workarounds are possible, I think a general solution that works properly for all possible use cases would be extremely tricky. The thing is that with biblatex a single document can contain several completely independent and separate bibliographies (via refsections) and different context-sensitive data for a single entry (via refcontexts). That makes it difficult to cover all possible cases in a general setting.

moewew avatar May 22 '21 08:05 moewew

Thanks for the information. How about implementing this feature in the most common situation (i.e., single refsection, no refcontext) first? At the same time, we can throw error or warning if encountering unsupported situations. Because in this way, we could at least achieve the same feature set as xr/xcite + Bibtex. We could expand the features to support refsection or refcontext in the future. What do you think?

FYI, my use case is primarily to cite the same references in a manuscript when writing a review response.

xu-cheng avatar May 22 '21 20:05 xu-cheng

Hmmm, I think I'd rather not ship an incomplete feature that works only in very specific circumstances. If there is an official implementation of something in biblatex, you'd expect it to work without rough edges and I don't think I can guarantee that for this. For now I feel much more comfortable referring people to the various solutions on TeX.SX, where it should be clear that some rough edges are expected and manual intervention might be needed.

We will definitely leave this open and can get back to this at any point if there is an idea to make this feature work in general.

moewew avatar May 23 '21 06:05 moewew