In radixpub/radix-r: 'R Markdown' Format for Scientific and Technical Writing

library(knitr)

Distill articles support including citations and a corresponding bibliography using standard R Markdown citation syntax. Distill also provides tools for making your articles more easily citeable, as well as for generating [Google Scholar] compatible citation metadata.

Citing other works

Use standard R Markdown bibliographies for citing other works. To do this, first create a bibliography file using a supported format (e.g. CSL or BibTeX) and refer to it from the bibliography field of the YAML front-matter. For example:

---
title: "Distill for R Markdown"
description: | 
  Scientific and technical writing, native to the web
output: distill::distill_article
date: May 4, 2018
author:
  - name: Nora Jones 
    url: https://example.com/norajones
    affiliation: Spacely Sprockets
    affiliation_url: https://example.com/spacelysprokets
bibliography: biblio.yaml
---

Here's an example of what a CSL bibliography might look like:

---
references:
- type: article-journal
  id: WatsonCrick1953
  author:
  - family: Watson
    given: J. D.
  - family: Crick
    given: F. H. C.
  issued:
    date-parts:
    - - 1953
      - 4
      - 25
  title: 'Molecular structure of nucleic acids: a structure for
    deoxyribose nucleic acid'
  title-short: Molecular structure of nucleic acids
  container-title: Nature
  volume: 171
  issue: 4356
  page: 737-738
  DOI: 10.1038/171737a0
  URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/171737a0
  language: en-GB
...

To cite this within your article, use standard R Markdown notation, for example: [@WatsonCrick1953] (referencing an id provided in the bibliography). See the documentation on Pandoc Citations for details on in-text citations, citing multiple works, etc.

Note that both CSL and BibTeX bibliographies are supported. See the Pandoc Bibliographies documentation for addional details on creating a bibliography for use with Pandoc.

Creating citeable articles {#creating-citeable-articles}

You can make it easier for others to cite your work by providing additional metadata with the YAML front-matter of your article. Citations can be provided for both articles published to the web or for articles published in journals (with or without a DOI).

Web articles

To provide a citation for an article published to the web, include author and date metadata as well as a citation_url. For example:

---
title: "Distill for R Markdown"
description: | 
  Scientific and technical writing, native to the web
date: May 4, 2018
author:
  - name: Nora Jones 
    url: https://example.com/norajones
    affiliation: Spacely Sprockets
    affiliation_url: https://example.com/spacelysprokets
citation_url: https://rstudio.github.io/distill
slug: jones2018distill
bibliography: biblio.bib
---

Note that the citation_url field is not required for blog articles (in that case it's computed automatically using the site's base_url field).

When this metadata is available, a citation appendix is automatically added to the article which looks like this:

{.screenshot width="95%"}

Note that we also included a slug field (in this case jones2018distill) which affects the abbreviated version of the citation included in the BibTeX entry. If you don't provide a slug then one will be automatically generated.

Journal articles

If your article is published within a Journal, you can add the following the additional fields to generate the appropriate citation entry:

| Metadata | Description | |-----------|---------------------------------------------------------| | journal | Name of Journal published within | | doi | Digital Object Identifier (DOI) |

Here's our previous examples amended with these fields:

---
title: "Distill for R Markdown"
description: | 
  Scientific and technical writing, native to the web
date: May 4, 2018
author:
  - name: Nora Jones 
    url: https://example.com/norajones
    affiliation: Spacely Sprockets
    affiliation_url: https://example.com/spacelysprokets
journal: "Journal of Data Science Software"
doi: "10.23915/distill.00010"
slug: jones2018distill
citation_url: https://rstudio.github.io/distill
bibliography: biblio.bib
---