Export citation popup

[mbollmann]

This implements a feature discussed in #412 and supersedes #1095. (this now does none of these things)

This implements a new citation popup modal, making the interface nicer and giving us more options for hopefully providing more citation options soon (re #412).

Feedback welcome!

[github-actions]

Build successful. You can preview it here: https://preview.aclanthology.org/export-citation-popup
This preview will be removed when the branch is merged.

[mjpost]

This is fantastic. Comments:

• In the markdown text, there is a small gap between the pieces of the link: [] ()
• Copying currently requires three clicks: Cite → [tab] → Copy to clipboard. What do you think about retaining this (for discoverability), but also adding four tiny buttons beneath the "Cite" button (on the main paper page) that does each of them directly? That way, after the first time, users would just learn which to click. There are probably suitable icons for these four.
• Should the "Bib export formats" line below copy this functionality? It seems odd that we repeat just the "Copy BibTeX to clipboard" line

[mbollmann]

• I think you're seeing the space before the (author, venue) part; there's no gap within the markdown link for me.
• What about changing the "Bib export formats" line to have "copy to clipboard" options for each, as a quick access option for these? That way users would only have to open the "cite" dialog if they wanted the file download, or a preview of the texts before copying.
• Also, there's no plain text / rich text version (as originally requested in Adding a plain ACL-style bibliography entry to the meta-information page.  #412 ...) yet. I'm not sure if this should be another tab in the dialog box or a line below the abstract, as suggested here. What do you think?

[mjpost]

1. Oh, you're right!
2. I like it.
3. Could it be both or will that get too crowded?

Very excited about this change.

[mjpost]

A further thought: on (3), I like the idea of the inline "Short citation" text, maybe with its own "copy to clipboard" button. We only need to list it once, as rich text; the user can then use system options to paste as rich text or plain text ("paste and match style" on a mac).

[mjpost]

I'll add, that if the feedback complicates this PR, such that it gets stalled, let's just postpone them. This is a fantastic improvement and I'd love to see it get pushed out this week!

[mbollmann]

Give me a day though to at least add some kind of plain text citation ;)

[mbollmann]

[akoehn]

Looks good, I just would switch markdown and bibtex, as bibtex is probably the dominant export format.

[mjpost]

Increasingly picky comments that can be ignored.

• The “Cite” button at the top stands out from “PDF” and “Search” in a negative way, to my eye. Not sure why it looks different
• “Citation (short)” feels wordy to me, and also redundant with the “Copy Citation” block above it. I’d suggest just calling it “Citation”, and moving it just above the “Copy Citation” block
• We could also also add “RTF” to the list of export options for completeness?

[mbollmann]

* The “Cite” button at the top stands out from “PDF” and “Search” in a negative way, to my eye. Not sure why it looks different

Is it just an aesthetic thing or does it actually look different for you? If the former, might be related to the width of the icon compared to the text. Maybe we could also use something else here now that the button doesn't actually download a file.

This here would be more in line with the citation symbol other websites (e.g. Google/Semantic Scholar) use:

Or this one:

Could of course also make the citation button primary-colored so that it stands out more:

* “Citation (short)” feels wordy to me, and also redundant with the “Copy Citation” block above it. I’d suggest just calling it “Citation”, and moving it just above the “Copy Citation” block

I'm thinking this is a very short and informal format, suitable for an email or blog post, but I wouldn't want to suggest that this is how we encourage papers in the Anthology to be cited. "short" would therefore be in contrast to the longer, ACL-style citation string that we can hopefully also add sometime soon.

* We could also also add “RTF” to the list of export options for completeness?

The button row, or the popup? Would it do the same thing the small copy button after "citation (short)" does right now?

[mjpost]

It looks quite different:

I like the cite with the double quotes! Probably we should color it as you displayed.

How about "Short citation" instead of "Citation (short)"?

I was thinking the popup and the button row, but I think we can leave it as you have it.

[mbollmann]

tl;dr: Adding preformatted citations is not free of problems. Do you feel it's worth it to proceed with this?

I've tweaked this a bit more so you can see what the code looks like & what this produces, currently only in the "Cite" popup, for example:

Some observations:

• The overhead for instantiating the Anthology class was indeed significant, from 27 seconds (without the citeproc code) to 193 seconds for me. I've moved the citation string generation to create_hugo_yaml.py now, but it'll still have an effect on the full build time of course.
• I can't find a CSL style that uses the short title fields for the proceedings (e.g. "EACL" instead of "Proceedings of the ..."). I think Semantic Scholar only does this because they don't even have the full name of the proceedings in their bib info. If we want something like this, I think we'd have to construct a variant where we substitute the short conference title explicitly.
• None of the other styles I've considered (Chicago, APA, MLA) appear to make use of the "month" field for conference paper entries.
• The CSL styles are not free of problems:
  • ACL style has problems with "month" field (as reported before)
  • Chicago styles crash on page ranges with Roman numerals, so I left it out for now
  • MLA style with URL produces problematic HTML (unescaped angle brackets), so I used the version without the URL for now
  • Citeproc-py's HTML formatter does not add hyperlinks to the output, neither for titles nor for URLs

I'd love to hear your thoughts on whether it's worth it to proceed with this. I could also move the more controversial/diificult changes to a separate PR, so we could proceed with merging the new citation popup already.

[nschneid]

Seems to me like having multiple citation styles (MLA, Chicago, APA) is overkill—I don't expect the Anthology gets a ton of users who would use that (though who knows, I could be wrong).

The plain text ACL seems like a nice-to-have for putting together informal bibliographies (say, in a blog post or course document) that are not in LaTeX. A warning message (beta feature—may contain errors) could excuse having occasional errors in these.

[nschneid]

Short conference names are a separate issue (#567, #791). Would be great to have eventually, but I wouldn't hold up this feature over that.

[nschneid]

• ACL style has problems with "month" field (as reported before)

Have you tried the CSL fix I suggested above?

[akoehn]

I would propose we table the plaintext references for now and merge the easy (i.e. sone) parts.

Maybe we can find js bibtex renderer at some point in time and can mitigate the whole up-front generation.

[mjpost]

I like having an RTF citations, but agree we don't need all of them. I don't share David's concern about the text format, but would rather have consensus here before moving forward on this. Moreover, I'm working about increasing the instantiation time, since it really make debugging a pain. Perhaps we should fix #835 first.

So how about we factor the controversial stuff into another draft PR, and at least get the new popups live?

[mbollmann]

I agree that plain-text/rich-text ACL-style format would be the nicest. If that's all we need, maybe we can also build our own formatter for that in pure Python, to reduce overhead.

Short conference names are a separate issue (#567, #791).

Yes, but tangential to this, as the CSL style files won't use them for anything.

Have you tried the CSL fix I suggested above?

Not yet! We should, but only if we go forward with having citeproc-py in the pipeline.

Moreover, I'm working about increasing the instantiation time, since it really make debugging a pain.

Instantiation time shouldn't be increased anymore with the latest commit here; overall build time is.

[mbollmann]

➡️ Split off into #1390

[mjpost]

Oh, I thought we'd at least be keeping Markdown in this PR. Any objections to that? My fear is that #1390 is going to get stalled...

I'll lave the squash-merge to you, Marcel!

[mbollmann]

Oh, I thought we'd at least be keeping Markdown in this PR. Any objections to that?

But isn't that exactly what David and others were concerned about?

[mjpost]

I thought David's concern stemmed from having a plain text "Short citation" format, inline on the main page. The Markdown format seems different to me (though maybe it's not in his mind).

[mbollmann]

I thought David's concern stemmed from having a plain text "Short citation" format, inline on the main page. The Markdown format seems different to me (though maybe it's not in his mind).

It's exactly the same format, though? The "short citation" was just the rendered Markdown string. Of course it's less prominent if it only appears in the popup, and I could also include a footnote there that it's not an official citation format... I dunno, I'll go with whatever you (plural) feel is fine and not too problematic.

[mjpost]

The risk of cutting-and-pasting seems even lower to me (less visible, requires adjusting), but probably we should leave things as they are.

[davidweichiang]

Sorry, I hadn't looked at the Markdown before and would have the same opinion about the "short" citation in any format.

On my browser (Safari 14) the preview looks like this:

which is a little weird.

[mbollmann]

Maybe the Bootstrap version we use doesn't style type="button" correctly on Safari ... since I don't have an iOS device, could you check again now @davidweichiang?

[davidweichiang]

Yup, after a refresh that looks great.

[mjpost]

Same here.

[nschneid]

Beautiful! Announce the new feature on Twitter?

[davidweichiang]

Looks great.

Tangential question: What does the Search button do? Just searches on the title?

[mbollmann]

Tangential question: What does the Search button do? Just searches on the title?

Yes exactly; on desktop the mouseover text will also say so. Opinions on whether or not to replace Google Scholar with Semantic Scholar via #1380, for the reasons expressed in #1339, are currently welcome!