Section Bibliographies Filter

Pandoc filter that generates a bibliography for each top-level section / chapter.

The filter allows the user to put bibliographies at the end of each section, containing only those references in the section. It works by splitting the document up into sections, and then treating each section as a separate document for citeproc to process.

Usage

The filter modifies the internal document representation; it can be used with many publishing systems that are based on pandoc.

Most users will want to set the reference-section-title metadata value to add a section heading to the reference section.

Plain pandoc

This filter interferes with the default operation of citeproc. The citeproc filter must either be run before this filter, or not at all. The section-bibliographies.lua filter calls citeproc as necessary. For example:

pandoc input.md --citeproc --lua-filter section-bibliographies.lua

or

pandoc input.md --lua-filter section-bibliographies.lua

Quarto

Users of Quarto can install this filter as an extension with

quarto install extension pandoc-ext/section-bibliographies

and use it by adding section-bibliographies to the filters entry in their YAML header. It is recommended to set the citeproc: false in the YAML header, as this minimizes interference with Quarto's default citation handling.

---
filters:
  - section-bibliographies
bibliography: my-bibliography.bib
reference-section-title: References
citeproc: false
---

Please Note: In some OS environments it might be necessary to use the complete absolute path to the .lua file for the filter, e.g.

filters:
  - /home/user/_extensions/pandoc-ext/section-bibliographies/section-bibliographies.lua

R Markdown

Use pandoc_args to invoke the filter. See the R Markdown Cookbook for details.

---
reference-section-title: References
output:
  word_document:
    pandoc_args: ['--lua-filter=section-bibliographies.lua']
---

Configuration

The filter allows customization through metadata fields, all nested below the section-bibliographies value:

section-bibiliograpies.cleanup-first : Remove the reference section added by a previous citeproc run. The default is false.

section-bibiliograpies.level : This variable controls what level the biblography will occur at the end of. The header of the generated references section will be one level lower than the section that it appears on (so if it occurs at the end of a level-1 section, it will receive a level-2 header, and so on).

section-bibiliograpies.minlevel : Sets the minimum section level at which bibliographies will be produced. The default is 1. Higher numbers will leave top-level sections unprocessed.

section-bibliographies.bibliography : Behaves like bibliography in the context of this filter. This variable exists because pandoc automatically invokes citeproc as the final filter if it is called with either --bibliography, or if the bibliography metadata is given via a command line option. Using section-bibs-bibliography on the command line avoids this unwanted invocation.

section-bibliographies.references : Behaves like references in the context of this filter.

The metadata fields section-bibs-level and section-bibs-bibliography have the same effect as the nested level and bibliography values, respectively. This is for for backwards compatibility. The old names are deprecated and should no longer be used.

Bibliography placement

Div elements with class sectionrefs can be used to manually place the bibliography. The filter will use the div as the container for the list of references, similar to how Div's with identifier refs are be used by plain citeproc.

If the sectionrefs div is nested below another heading, then that heading must be marked with the sectionbibliography class, or otherwise it might be ignored.

# Here is one section

This reference to [@cohen:jokes] will be listed under [my refs].

## A subsection

Here is a not very interesting subsection.

## Bibliography {.sectionbibliography}

Some extra comments on the bibliography can go here.

::: {.sectionrefs}
:::

License

This pandoc Lua filter is published under the MIT license, see file LICENSE for details.