Conversation

bibliography management is a dinosaur (bibtex, endnote) designed for dead-tree serialized documents... with online use bolted on as a bad afterthought (see footnotes in online docs for eg). Need an online-native model. The serialized print doc should be the afterthought.
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the problem online is that hyperlinks are not stable enough (target could vanish, go obsolete, get replaced), but the solution isn't to retreat to bad ports of dead-tree models... you need things inspired by transclusion (pull in a copy of enough of the cited ref)
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but you still do need to make a distinction between core text, and referential periphery matter. But it should exist as a sort of backdrop/margins fringe. Like if you wanted to preserve an impression in concrete, you'd carve out a slab around the impression.
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ie there's still a first class and second class citizen divide -- your content vs. referenced content. The flattened hyperlink model kinda dissolves that divide and then the core document decoheres. You don't want that. Unless you do...which you sometimes do
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actually, the idea of a "naked" reference with a very thin pointer as in "John Doe [1] argued that Vulcans are superior to Romulans because XYZ" is a product of scarcity because your private notes about [1] are too hard to expose in a useful way in a traditional research mode.
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If it's a lazy ref where you didn't actually read it, but are citing it for political/social reasons (for eg. you expect the author to be a likely peer reviewer and want to flatter their conceit up front)... that's actually a social problem with peer review based production.
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Interestingly non-academic quasi-scholarly writing does not have this particular problem, though it has others. No kiss-ass citations. I hated those back when I was doing academic writing. I'm working on a whitepaper project now and it's refreshingly free of such imperatives.
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I definitely agree. In the context of academia I would say a lot of this isn’t just outdated bibliography management but also still just sad remnants of the dominance of the physical publication? I love the way and others are showing how much better that could be.
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Aren't you supposed to include such notes as part of the text where the reference is? "algorithm X is described in [1]", or "[2] argues for XYZ while [3] argues for ABC".