Including your publications on your Quarto website
In my efforts to continue to replicate my old website, I added a list of my publications. Read on if you’d like to do the same for your own Quarto website!
Get a .bib file
The first thing you need to get is a bibliography with your publications in it. I would recommend getting yours from ORCiD. If you don’t already have a profile, now’s a good time to get one and start aggregating your publications in one place.
Once you’re logged in to your ORCiD account, scroll down to your ‘Works’ section, click the ‘Actions’ drop-down and click ‘Export ALL works’. This will export all your publications to a .bib file. Perfect!
You can of course get a .bib file from other places, such as Google Scholar. My issue with Google Scholar was that it didn’t include DOIs, which meant the list of publications did not have clickable links for people to easily go to the articles.
Tidy up the .bib file
Put the .bib file somewhere in your Quarto website folder. Mine just sits in the root folder.
Next, open up the file with RStudio or whatever text editor you prefer. We need to check the entries are sensible and are going to be formatted as you expect.
Check the titles
While it does depend on what citation style you are using, it seems the majority of styles will format your article title in sentence case, which is a problem for proper nouns. For example, my paper “Mental and neurodevelopmental health needs of Aboriginal children with experience of out-of-home care: a Western Australian data-linkage study” would get formatted such that ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘Western Australia’ would be entirely lower-case, which isn’t correct.
To fix this, we have to ‘protect’ the letters we want capitalised by putting them in curly brackets {}. See the example below where I have the original .bib entry from ORCiD and the protected entry which will preserve the capitalisation of the proper nouns.
@article{Harrap_2024,
title={Mental and neurodevelopmental health needs of Aboriginal children with experience of<0xa0>out-of-home care: a Western Australian data-linkage study},
volume={48},
ISSN={1326-0200},
url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anzjph.2024.100181}, DOI={10.1016/j.anzjph.2024.100181},
number={5},
journal={Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health},
publisher={Elsevier BV},
author={Harrap, Benjamin and Gibberd, Alison and O’Donnell, Melissa and Jones, Jocelyn and Chenhall, Richard and McNamara, Bridgette and Simons, Koen and Eades, Sandra},
year={2024},
month=oct,
pages={100181}
}
@article{Harrap_2024,
title={Mental and neurodevelopmental health needs of {A}boriginal children with experience of<0xa0>out-of-home care: a {W}estern {A}ustralian data-linkage study},
volume={48},
ISSN={1326-0200},
url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anzjph.2024.100181}, DOI={10.1016/j.anzjph.2024.100181},
number={5},
journal={Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health},
publisher={Elsevier BV},
author={Harrap, Benjamin and Gibberd, Alison and O’Donnell, Melissa and Jones, Jocelyn and Chenhall, Richard and McNamara, Bridgette and Simons, Koen and Eades, Sandra},
year={2024},
month=oct,
pages={100181}
}
Check for wacky symbols
You may have noticed in the title of the above citation that <0xa0> appears in the title. This should just be a space but for some reason ORCiD has exported it as a non-breaking space. Just replace it with a space.
Make sure you have a look through the entries for other wacky things. In my .bib file, the journal ‘Child Abuse & Neglect’ was entered as Child Abuse {\&}amp$\mathsemicolon$ Neglect, which should instead have been Child Abuse {\&} Neglect. Similarly, my coauthor Melissa O’Donnell had been listed as Melissa O{\textquotesingle}Donnell, which can just be replaced with Melissa O'Donnell.
Don’t worry if you can’t find everything at this stage, you’ll probably notice anything you missed when you check the page on your website.
Get a .csl file
Next we need to pick the citation style you want to use. Zotero have a great repository of .csl files to choose from. Which style you pick is personal preference, I went with APA 7th.
Just like the .bib file, put the .csl file in your Quarto website folder. Again, mine just sits in the root folder.
Change the sort order
It varies with the style you use, but the default sort order for APA 7th is to order citations by author and then ascending by date. Instead, I want the citations to be sorted by year of publication first, then by author. To change this, open the .csl file in RStudio and find the start of the <bibliography> tag. Searching for <bibliography should take you there, but if not, it should be somewhere near the bottom.
To change the sort order, switch around the arguments inside the <sort> tag and change “ascending” to “descending”. The example below demonstrates.
<bibliography hanging-indent=“true” et-al-min=“21” et-al-use-first=“19” et-al-use-last=“true” entry-spacing=“0” line-spacing=“2”>
<sort>
<key macro=“author-sort”/>
<key macro=“date-sort-group” sort=“ascending”/>
<key macro=“date-sort” sort=“ascending”/>
<key variable=“status”/>
<key macro=“title”/>
</sort>
⋮
<bibliography hanging-indent=“true” et-al-min=“21” et-al-use-first=“19” et-al-use-last=“true” entry-spacing=“0” line-spacing=“2”>
<sort>
<key macro=“date-sort-group” sort=“descending”/>
<key macro=“date-sort” sort=“descending”/>
<key macro=“author-sort”/>
<key variable=“status”/>
<key macro=“title”/>
</sort>
⋮
Change the citation spacing
The other thing we need to do is change the spacing between citations. The default is to have no line between them, which looks horrible and claustrophobic on a website. Instead we want to add a line spacing. In the same <bibliography> tag as before, change the entry-spacing argument from 0 to 2, as per below.
<bibliography hanging-indent=“true” et-al-min=“21” et-al-use-first=“19” et-al-use-last=“true” entry-spacing=“0” line-spacing=“2”>
<sort>
<key macro=“date-sort-group” sort=“descending”/>
<key macro=“date-sort” sort=“descending”/>
<key macro=“author-sort”/>
<key variable=“status”/>
<key macro=“title”/>
</sort> ⋮
<bibliography hanging-indent=“true” et-al-min=“21” et-al-use-first=“19” et-al-use-last=“true” entry-spacing=“2” line-spacing=“2”>
<sort>
<key macro=“date-sort-group” sort=“descending”/>
<key macro=“date-sort” sort=“descending”/>
<key macro=“author-sort”/>
<key variable=“status”/>
<key macro=“title”/>
</sort> ⋮
Create your publications page
The last thing we need to do is create the page on your website! Create an empty Quarto file in your root directory and call it publications.qmd. Open this up and paste in the below.
---
title: "Publications"
format: html
bibliography: works.bib
csl: apa.csl
nocite: |
@*
---
:::{#refs}
:::We’re using the .bib and .csl files we just sorted out. The nocite argument with the @* wildcard is what gets Quarto to print all citations from the bibliography.
Ok the actual last thing we need to do is add the publications page to your navigation bar. Open up your site’s _quarto.yml file and add it to the website argument as follows:
website:
navbar:
right:
- post.qmd
- publications.qmd
- cv.qmd
- contact.qmdThat’s it! Feel free to keep tinkering with the layout etc., at least you’ve got something in place now.