It may indeed be a contradiction in terms. I would be a nice one,
though, since it helps to solve a problem.
The problem is to have a single document source which will
consistently produce a valid output with (possibly) every CSL citation
style.
And hence the issue we are facing: suppose we are talking about some
author’s work, and not just referencing to it.
In pandoc we could express that with:
Doe [-@item1] said that...
That is to say, we hard-code the author’s name and suppress it (by
setting the suppress-author bit) in the following citation.
That would be rendered, in an in-text author-date style:
Doe (2005) said that...
In a footnote style, that would be:
Doe(1) said that...
(1) A book, 2005.
and what about a purely numeric style? Suppose we decide that, in such
kind of styles, “suppress-author” is ignored (or have some effect on
the formatting). Then it would render as:
Doe [1] said that…
The problem here is ‘Doe’. In such a style that may be undesirable.
Moreover, since citation numbers are generated on the fly, how would
you refer to that reference, if you wanted to use numbers?
Hence the idea: we produce ‘Doe’ too, with an “author-only” citation
and a new rule: in a purely numeric style “suppress-author” will
suppress the output and an “author-only” citation will become a
citation number without formatting.
See here for a hopefully more comprehensible example:
http://gsl-nagoya-u.net/http/pub/citeproc-doc.html#automating-text-insertions
Since even the author name is produced by the citeproc, switching
between different citation styles will always produce a consistent
output. Well, not really always…
There are some problems too, as the pandoc discussion demonstrate. In
pandoc you will be able to write:
Doe [-@item1; but see also @item2] said that...
That will be rendered as:
Doe (2005, but see also Roe 2004) said that...
Doe(1) said that...
(1) 2005, but see also Roe 2004.
What should happen in a numeric style?
Doe, but see also [2], said that...
I think.
Anyway, in pandoc, we are going to introduce a “textual citation”, so
that you could also be writing:
@item1 said that...
which will produce:
Doe (2005) said that...
Doe(1) said that...
(1) A Book, 2005.
Reference [1] said that...
The citeproc, though, will translate:
@item1 said that…
into:
[+@item1] [-@item1] said that…
where ‘+@’ means "set the “author-only” bit.
Obviously the first one [+@item1] is a special citation (since it
occurs before [-@item1]), and must not affect the other citations
positioning ([-@item1] is not ibid, and may even be the “first”,
right?).
Does all this make sense?
Andrea