Include the text of a `bibentry` in the (R)markdown text body output

Question

I have been looking for a solution to include the full text of a reference item (bibentry) in the body of the (R)markdown text document, that is, before the reference list. This can be done with LaTeX (https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/49048/how-to-cite-one-bibentry-in-full-length-in-the-body-text). Can it be done with (R)markdown?

Answer 1

A reasonable solution is to read and parse the bibliography database using, for example, the R-package bibtex and then capture.output of print as a character string, which can then be used to include the full text of a reference item (bibentry) in the body of the (R)markdown text document.

For example:

```{r, echo=FALSE}
biblio <- bibtex::read.bib("my-biblio-database.bib")
```

Then, in line, use:

`r capture.output(print(biblio["my-bibkey"]))`

which will print the reference text.

Answer 2

The bibtex interprets the bibliography file and places it into the bibentry class, which is part of the utils package.

Thus, the correct way of showing a citation is to switch away from the accepted answer of:

`r capture.output(biblio["my-bibkey"])`

to

`r format(biblio["my-bibkey"], style = "text")`

Note, we're using the utils:::format.bibentry(entry, style = "text") to correctly set the output display.