Citation Backlinks

In the vanilla Pandoc Citeproc, you can use link-citations to control whether citations in the body of the text should be clickable links to the reference in the bibliography (e.g. EN). This is a very useful feature, especially when you want to quickly check the source of a citation without having to scroll through the whole text.

The citetools extension will take this one step further and add, in a crescent ordinal fashion [1, 2, 3, 4]¹, a backlink to each citation an entry has received in the document.

This allows the reader to easily arrive at sections of the text where the same reference was discussed, quickly seeing with the array of backlinks, how many times each reference was used in the text (see reference at the bottom of the text).

How to avoid an excess of undesired links

In citetools there are options to avoid undesired linking and anomalies caused by citing individual fields, such as repeated links to the same entry in a single phrase or section.

Turning off links in individual citations

First, there is the option to force a citation to not be a link by adding a simple dot at the end of the .csl_field.

Default	Link-suppresion
[@EN]{.title}	[@EN]{.title.}
Ethica nicomachea	Ethica nicomachea

Global options

Then, there is also the global link-fields option, which allows the user to turn off links in citations that target individual fields. It can be used in conjunction with other options that target the bibliography, such as link-citations and link-bibliography.

link-citations: true
link-fields: true
link-bibliography: true
lang: en-ZA

1

Hyperlink citations to the corresponding bibliography entries. Defaults to false.

2

Hyperlink citations that target specific CSL fields to the corresponding entries in the bibliography. If link-citations is true, this defaults to true.

3

Hyperlink DOIs, PMCIDs, PMID, and URLs in bibliographies. Defaults to true.

4

Affects the bibliography tags. Defaults to en-US.

References

Aristotle. 1831. “Ethica Nicomachea.” In Aristotelis Opera, edited by Immanuel Bekker, 1094a01–1181b23. Berlim: Reimer. [1, 2]

Footnotes

1. In other output formats, such as PDF, the reader will see the page number instead of a crescent ordinal number.

Citation

BibTeX citation:

@online{vasconcelos2023,
  author = {Vasconcelos, BCDA},
  title = {Citation {Backlinks}},
  date = {2023},
  url = {https://bcdavasconcelos.github.io/citetools/docs_qmd/04-citation-backlinks.html},
  langid = {en}
}

For attribution, please cite this work as:

Vasconcelos, BCDA. 2023. “Citation Backlinks.” 2023. https://bcdavasconcelos.github.io/citetools/docs_qmd/04-citation-backlinks.html.