* Zotero, with BetterBibTex plugin [^2]
* pandoc, through its updated citeproc library [^3]
* the citation plugin for Obsidian, which uses CSL-JSON [^4]
This might in the end be my personal preference, but a standardized JSON format (which is just as easily adaptable to YAML [^5]) seems much easier to parse and modify than Bibtex, with its sheer complexity. If we want to have the ability to easily cite anything, then this direction of standardization, I believe, is a must.
[^1]: https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema#csl-json-s...
[^2]: https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/exporting/pandoc/#u...
[^3]: https://github.com/jgm/citeproc
[^4]: https://github.com/hans/obsidian-citation-plugin
[^5]: https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/issues/278
There's already a lot of open source work going on around CSL, which I think originally comes out of Zotero.
While CSL comes from Javascript world, there already is a complete ruby implementation, providing ability to format a cituation into any citation style in the CSL style repository. https://github.com/inukshuk/csl-ruby https://github.com/inukshuk/citeproc
Even if github or other open source authors weren't happy with that implementation (whether for legitimate reasons or "not invented here"), it would still have been nice to do something around the basic CSL standards in some way, instead of inventing a new similar standard in ".cff".
There are orgs doing super heavy lifting like crossref and orcid to make discovery as data better while google etc make things worse by encouraging discovery as content without offering standard outputs.
At least in this case, Github will output standards in the UI, but it would be much better to encourage storage in those formats too, instead of adding one.
[0]: https://talk.commonmark.org/t/cross-references-and-citations...
Proper place where to surface such software dependencies is not in the paper but in the open source code released together with the paper.
Software is applied computation research, and if using a published research method is enough to warrant citation, then using an open-source library certainly warrants inclusion.
If the world isn't going to come up with ways to monetarily fund open-source, giving open-source developers the tools to help them compete in academia is a great move.
If MathJax/KaTeX is the Javascript version of LaTeX math mode, then what's the Javascript version of Bib(La)TeX?
