A month ago, I wrote about John Kitchin’s org-ref package. At the time, it was still an alpha-level project but showed tremendous promise. Happily, Kitchin has continued work on the project and it is now in a ready-for-end-users state. It’s still not an ELPA package but it is available at Kitchin’s GitHub. The GitHub entry is interesting. True to Kitchin’s reproducible research sensibilities, the whole package is an Org file written in a Literate programming style that both documents the package and provides the code. If you’re interested in seeing how to build such a file, click on the Raw button to see the Org source.
The latest news is that Kitchin has produced a video that demonstrates the package. You can see the package in action and get a sense for how you’d use it when writing a technical document. A bibliography is one of those things that’s not really all that hard to deal with but they can be fussy and use up a lot of mental cycles on trivial details. Org-ref helps automate all the fiddly bits .
The video is just short of 11 and half minutes so you won’t need to block out a lot of time. Don’t worry about copying down any of the details; those are all in the Org file at GitHub. In a comment to my previous post, Kitchin indicated that they hope to have org-ref integrated into Org itself. I hope that happens.