Finally, Citation.js supports DOIs. It took a while, but it’s finally there. One big ‘but’: synchronous fetching doesn’t work in Chrome. I’m still looking into that, but I should be recommending you to use Cite.async() anyway. Also in this blog post: more stability in Cite#get(), a welcome byproduct of using the DOI API, and looking forward (again). DOI support So, DOIs. That was (and is) a though one. Let me guide you through the process.

I worked on updates for Citation.js in the past few weeks, and I thought I'd go over them in this post. Async First of all, Citation.js now has support for asynchronous parsing, so it won't lag your app as much when it uses e.g. the Wikidata API. This is good, as synchronous requests are not only blocking your app, but also deprecated in most major browsers.

My new homepage is finally finished (for now). I say finally, because it has taken a while before it actually felt done. You know how the first 90% of the work takes 90% of the time, but the last 10% of the work takes another 90% of the time? I just had to finish writing a single, small piece of text and it would be complete, but it took about 2 weeks.

The Weecology lab group run by Morgan Ernest and Ethan White at the University of Florida is seeking a post-doctoral researcher to study changes in ecological communities through time.

Citation.js now supports BibJSON. How I did that without actually updating Citation.js? Well, apparently I supported it all along. I've supported the quickscrape output format since July last year, and that turned out to be BibJSON. How convenient. I'll update the demo and docs to reflect this revelation (currently it just says "quickscrape's JSON scheme"), and, now that I can find actual documentation, some improvements to the parser.

We are very exited to announce a major new release of the Data Retriever, our software for making it quick and easy to get clean, ready to analyze, versions of publicly available data. The Data Retriever, automates the downloading, cleaning, and installing of ecological and environmental data into your choice of databases and flat file formats.

The new update (Citation.js v0.2.10) doesn't have a big impact on the API, but a lot has changed in the back end. ("back end" as in the helper functions that are called when the API is used.) First of all, there is Travis build tests now. It doesn't have edge test cases yet, but it covers the basics. Testing the basic specs The main thing is the new BibTeX I/O system. It isn't completely new, but a lot has changed.

In the last two weeks I've been busy with making Version 0.2 of Citation.js. Here I'll explain some of the changes and the reasoning behind them. In the past months I've updated Citation.js several times, and the changes included a Node.js program for the commandline and better Wikidata input parsing. While I was working with the "old" code, I noticed some annoying issues in it. One of the biggest things was the internal data format.

When developing Citation.js, I needed to get a JavaScript Object from a string representing one. There are several methods for this, and the one that comes to mind first is JSON.parse(). However, this didn't work.

Last week I made Citation.js usable for the command line, with Node.js. First of all, the main file determines if it is being run with Node.js or in the browser, and switches to Browser or Nodejs mode based on that.