Romain Francois suggests that a central bibliographic database
(possibly in bibtex format) might be useful for reference inclusion
in R package man pages. This has been discussed by a small
group, with one proposal presented for a package-specific bibtex database
placed in a dedicated package subdirectory. Man page references would
then cite the sources enumerated in the database using their bibtex
tags. This approach could encourage better annotation and should
confer greater accuracy on package:literature referencing.
This does not rule out a central archive that might include all the
references cited in base man pages.
We are doing some work on harvesting the bibliographic citations
in man pages in an R distribution, and converting them to a regular
format. The \references section is free form, so the conversion
is not trivial, but progress has been made.
The infrastructure required to use this approach to propagate
(e.g., bibtex-formatted) bibliographic data into the man pages that
cite the sources is not yet available, but we hope to have some
prototypes in the next month.
[apologies if i mess up the threading on this topic; i did not receive
the original e-mail to r-devel]
Vince Carey
stvjc at channing.harvard.edu