Well, I am pleased to say that we have now released the new version of kcite. It’s been a while in coming — I had the difficult bit of the code working about 5 months ago, but then got caught up in teaching. Kcite is our bibliography manager which enables citations such as this one [cite]10.1371/journal.pone.0012258[/cite], using DOI or PubMed IDs.

Kcite now uses the marvellous citeproc.js to render the bibliography on the client. The main advantage of this for this release is that the biblography formatting is slightly more regular than before. We’ve also switched to name-author style as the default. There is also a disadvantage which is that the browser has to do lots of Javascript execution client-side; I’ve made efforts to ensure that this is not too onerous; on my desktop, I have been rendering 200-300 item bibliographies, which is much more than most people will use in practice.

In future versions, however, I feel the use of citeproc-js will really come into it’s own. We should be able to enable the user to select their own citation style (currently this is the choice of the authors which makes little sense). We can also add any semantics to the HTML that we choose — CiTO will come properly, for instance. I can also clean up the “unresolved” and “timed out” references. However, first thing on the list is to make the call back for the bibliographic data asychronous. Client-side this should be easy, as we are already using jquery. Server-side requires rewrite rules which I haven’t done before, but I think should not be too hard.

On a separate track, now that I have kcite on what I think is a stable technological footing, I can start to extend in other ways, the most obvious being additional forms of identifiers, critically including Wordpress posts with kcite enabled. I’m also pleased that Cross-Ref have recently added the ability to drag metadata in citeproc format (JSON), which means I can skip an integration step.

However, before all of that, we need to restore kblog. We’ve taken the opportunity to move it to a better technological footing, and have started to prepare the new machine that it will be hosted on. This has taken a long time, due to a busy start to the (academic) year. Hopefully, getting hacked is not something we will repeat soon.

The current release of kcite is 1.4.1. This fixes two bugs, one reported by Carl Boettinger (so that now the Javascript only loads when necessary) and another I found which writing this post which made editors appears as authors.