As I’ve said before, one of the worst parts of preparing a paper for publication is dealing with the bibliography. LaTeX has reasonably efficient ways of inserting and referencing citations but there’s been no effective way of using them from within Org. John Kitchin pretty much solved this problem—at least for his use cases—with org-ref but some in the Org-mode community thought a more general mechanism was needed.
Enter Org-cite. It’s a general method for dealing with citations within Org and although it hasn’t been officially released yet, it’s been merged and is available for those who want to try it out.
Timothy over at This Month in Org has a very nice summary of the new system in his Introducing Citations article. Org-cite is meant to be a framework for developing citation systems specific to a user’s workflow. John Kitchin has already started porting the functionality of his org-ref system to org-cite with org-ref-cite. Kitchin has a video out the describes his new package that Irreal will consider shortly but it’s still a work in progress. Kitchin says it’s not yet ready for MELPA but will probably appear there shortly.
Org-ref is already a great package for dealing with citations and cross references but org-cite standardizes citation processing in Org and I expect that all the great functionality of org-ref will eventually find its way into org-ref-cite. These packages make it less and less necessary to write your papers in anything but Org. Even when LaTeX tweaks are needed, they’re easy to add directly into the Org file. Preparing, if not actually writing, papers is getting easier and easier.