Citation of R packages directly on Quarto

[jospueyo]

Description

How nice it would be having a function to directly cite R packages in Quarto? Something like:

r citation(<package>) and the output becoming a reference as any other reference.

I tried doing a custom function with the following workflow:

1. Extract the information using citation()
2. Use rmarkdown::metadata$bibliography to obtain the bibliography file.
3. Use writeLines() to add the reference to the bib file.
4. Output a markdown reference @.

However, the problem is that the changes in bibliography are persistent so it does not work when render the file a second time. I would be keen to do a pull request if I receive some guidance on how to surpass this problem.

[mcanouil]

See:

• How to accumulate `packages.bib` used in a Quarto book #5806

[arnaudgallou]

Here're existing solutions to do this:

• pakret
• grateful
• softbib

Being the developer of pakret, I'll naturally recommend it over the other two. Now to be a bit more objective, pakret is simpler to use and a lot more flexible. Compared to grateful and softbib, pakret offers the following advantages:

• allows inline citations
• uses a template system, giving full control on how to cite packages in the text (you could use it in a text written in Chinese for example)
• doesn't overwrite bib files so you can use a single file to reference both papers and packages
• can write references in different bib files
• doesn't require any parametrization to be used
• uses a single reference by package to avoid bloating the reference list
• uses consistent package keys to reference R packages