Enable a “Featured” Citation per pub

I am so impressed, consistently, with the thoughtfulness and speed (both!) of the updates, and the service overall.

I have a feature request that may or may not be an edge case: enabling a “Featured” or “Formatted” citation, on analogy with the ability to upload a “Formatted PDF” that is set above --and distinguished from–the auto-generated download options.

The rationale is that, while the auto-generated citations work for many pub types–and are a fabulous default—-they are not “correct” citations in many cases. A book chapter in any of the existing auto-generated formats (APA, Harvard, Vancouver, even BibTeX) should have location and publisher name, as well as editor(s) names if applicable.

It’s true that this issue might be fixed, but my further rationale is that (1) there are plenty of edge cases where auto-generated formats will never work; and (2) authors/contributors may prefer a format other than, or in addition to, the four that are provided.

Here is an actual example of such an edge case. At mediastudies.press, we have a public domain series, where we are using PubPub to re-publish public domain works, with a new introduction and footnoted editorial commentary. Here is an example chapter:

https://msp.pubpub.org/pub/rc85xv4u

The auto-generated citation (APA) is:

Rorty, J. (2019). Preface: I Was an Ad-man Once. In Our Master’s Voice: Advertising. https://doi.org/10.21428/3f8575cb.7a8e6b5f

We happen to use the Chicago Manual of Style, which instead calls for something like this (attaching a screenshot):

Rorty, James. (1934) 2019. In Our Master’s Voice: Advertising. New York: John Day Company. Reprint, Bethlehem, PA: mediastudies.press. https://doi.org/10.21428/3f8575cb.7a8e6b5f

Instead of asking PubPub’s auto-generation capabilities to tackle complicated cases like reprints, my suggestion is to allow a citation override, or a “Featured Citation”, in an individual Pub’s Manage popover–perhaps in the Details tab (in part since the Formatted PDF upload option is there). If it is a featured citation, it could be a simple text field (though with rich formatting) that is activated if a creator adds any text. If the auto-generated citations remain visible in this scenario, perhaps they could be separated in an obvious way, with “auto-generated” appearing analogously to the download menu now.

That’s the main suggestion. A minor variation would be to allow a creator to designate (with a second text field?) the citation style (e.g., “Chicago 17th full note”).

Thanks for considering!

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I also want to be able to use a custom string as my citation.

The way Citoid handles this in mediawiki: you have the option of using an auto-guessed citation (using one of a few common templates), or explicitly using one of those ~5 common templates, or using a hand-formatted string. However you choose to generate this, its fields (or string of text) are then editable.