configuring grouping

CSL Development
1

I’ve raised this issue a few times before, and have finally gotten
close to something I’m happy with.

Question, then: how to configure reference list grouping in a way that
is flexible but elegant, both from an XML standpoint, and WRT to
implementation in a GUI?

Answer:

Add a cs:groups structure to cs:bibliography. Have that solely be
responsible for configuring grouping and ordering (not layout of the
individual reference entries).

Examples:

  1. Group by creator.

Some styles explicitly group by author (well all author-year styles do,
but they just repeat the author name, or some proxy for it, each entry;
in this case the name is only listed for the first entry).

   <groups>
     <group by="creator">
       <heading type="creator-name"/>
     </group>
   </groups>

Aside: given what I say parenthetically above, perhaps grouping should
not be optional for author-year types? That detail bears more thought.

  1. Group by genre or reference type. This is quite common in the
    humanities. The logic would work such that if there was no cs:reftype
    child, then this would be assumed the default.

    Legal Documents Newspaper Sources General References

Might be bit of a PITA to process, but not too bad.

  1. Primary and secondary sources. This is a tricky one, as David has
    made the argument one would need to assign groups in this case. I am
    assuming the formatter can have some generic logic to handle this.
    E.g., primary sources do not have publishers, and are not articles?

    Secondary Sources Primary Sources

  2. Martha’s favorite: see also references; what in BibTeX are called
    "noncite."

    References Additional Sources

Thoughts? Consider, in particular, how this would all work in a GUI,
or how you would code the processing if you had to write a processor in
your language of choice.

Bruce