catena/crates/citefind/README.md

# citefind

The references in a bibliography or a page of notes.

Part of [catena](../../README.md).

## What it does

A reference list is the one place in a book where the text is already
structured. Every entry names a work, and most name it in one of a handful of
shapes that have not changed in a century. What is missing is not information
but punctuation: the entries run together, and nothing in the file says where
one stops.

So this does two jobs. It cuts the block into entries — at the note numbers
where there are any, at the layout where there are not. Then it reads each
entry as far as its shape allows, and **names the fields it could not settle**
rather than guessing at them.

That last part is the point. A made-up year and a real one are
indistinguishable three stages downstream; a missing one is not.

## When you would use it

- **Building a citation graph** — which works a book leans on, and how often.
- **Finding the identifiers** in a reference list, to hand to
  [`idnorm`](../idnorm/README.md) and [`bibfetch`](../bibfetch/README.md).
- **Filling a catalogue** from the back of a book rather than from a register.
- **Costing a model run**: ask one about the entries that did not parse, and
  nothing else.

## Install

```sh
cargo install --git https://git.pumpin.online/funkpower/catena citefind
```

## Example

```
$ citefind bibliography.md
{"v":1,"idx":0,"text":"Smith, John. *The Making of the Second Estate*. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.","authors":["Smith, John"],"year":1998,"title":"The Making of the Second Estate","container":"Clarendon Press","ids":[],"kind":"book","continuation":false,"unsettled":[]}
{"v":1,"idx":1,"text":"Doe, Jane, and Peter Brown. \"Obligation and Its Limits.\" *Journal of Medieval Studies* 12, no. 3 (2001): 45-67.","authors":["Doe, Jane","Peter Brown"],"year":2001,"title":"Obligation and Its Limits","container":"Journal of Medieval Studies","pages":"45-67","ids":[],"kind":"article","continuation":false,"unsettled":[]}
```

What a book cites, by year:

```sh
citefind bibliography.md | jq -r 'select(.year) | .year' | sort | uniq -c
```

The identifiers, checked and resolved:

```sh
citefind refs.md | jq -r '.ids[] | select(.kind == "doi") | .id' | idnorm | bibfetch
```

The works it leans on hardest, from a page of endnotes:

```sh
citefind notes.md | jq -r 'select(.title) | .title' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
```

## Asking a model about the rest

`--prompt` writes a question about the entries that did not parse, and only
those. Nothing is sent from here: the prompt goes to stdout and what happens
to it is yours to decide.

```
$ citefind --prompt refs.md
Below are entries from the bibliography or notes of a book. Each was read as
far as its punctuation allowed, and the fields that could not be read off it
are listed with it.

--- 0
text: Marron, Kevin Ritual Abuse, Seal Books, 1988
year: 1988
wanted: authors, title, container
...
```

```sh
citefind --prompt refs.md | ollama run qwen3:8b > reply.json
citefind --merge reply.json refs.md
```

A reply fills in only the fields that were asked about. A model that
volunteers a better title for an entry whose title was read off the page is
overruled — the page is evidence and the model is a guess — and a reply that
is not one JSON object is refused rather than half-applied.

One prompt covers every unsettled entry rather than one prompt each. A
reference list is long and mostly ordinary; the entries worth asking about are
the mangled few, and they are cheaper to ask about together.

## Options

| Option | Effect |
|---|---|
| `--prompt` | Write the question about what did not parse, instead of the records |
| `--merge FILE` | Fill in what did not parse from a model's reply |
| `--quiet`, `-q` | Say nothing; the exit code is the answer |
| `--man` | Write this page as a manual page, in roff |

## Exit codes

| Code | Meaning |
|---|---|
| `0` | It found references |
| `1` | It found none |
| `64` | The command line was wrong |
| `65` | The input was not readable as text, or a reply was not JSON |
| `74` | The file could not be read |

## The record

| Field | What it holds |
|---|---|
| `text` | The entry as it appeared, whitespace collapsed |
| `marker` | The note number it carried, where it carried one |
| `authors` | The names, in the order and the form the entry gave them |
| `year` | The year of publication |
| `title` | The work cited — for an article the article, not the journal |
| `container` | The journal it appeared in, or the publisher of a book |
| `pages` | The pages, as written |
| `ids` | Any DOI, ISBN, ISSN, arXiv id or URL, normalised |
| `kind` | `book`, `article`, `chapter`, `web` or `other` |
| `continuation` | Whether it only points back at an earlier entry |
| `unsettled` | The fields it could not read off the entry |

`text` is kept whatever else was read, because every other field is an
interpretation of it and somebody will want to check.

## How it cuts

**A page of notes** is cut at its note numbers, in any of the shapes
conversion leaves them: `12.`, `[12]`, `fn39.`, a superscript, or a
back-reference link. The pattern is the one
[`chunkmd`](../chunkmd/README.md) uses to recognise a page of notes, so the
two cannot drift apart, with one form added — a link pointing at another file
rather than at a fragment. `chunkmd` is deciding whether a chunk is a page of
notes and can afford to miss one marker in thirty; here a missed marker runs
two references together.

A note that cites nothing is dropped. A page of notes mixes bibliographic
notes with discursive ones, and a remark about the argument is not a
reference — and one that runs on for six sentences with no imprint, no page
reference and no identifier is a remark whatever else it mentions.

A note that cites **several works** becomes several records, cut at the
semicolons that separate them, each keeping the note's number. A full stop
separates works in a note too, and is not used: it also separates the author
from the title in every bibliography entry ever written.

Where the first note number sits a long way into the block, what precedes it
is the body of the page rather than a note that lost its number, and it is
left out.

**A bibliography** numbers nothing, so the signal is layout: a blank line
between entries, a hanging indent under each, or the surname-comma opening
that nearly every author-first entry begins with. Whichever the block carries
is the one used. When it carries none of them the fallback is one entry per
line, which is right for a list that was never wrapped and visibly wrong for
one that was.

## What it will not do

**Resolve `ibid.`** A continuation refers to whatever was cited before it,
which is a fact about the surrounding page and not about the entry. It is
flagged `continuation` and left alone, and it is left out of `--prompt`
entirely — there is nothing in it to ask about.

**Report a title it did not find.** An entry held together by commas alone,
with no names to anchor it, yields no title rather than its own text echoed
back. Nor does a run carrying a page reference or a semicolon count as one:
that is two entries run together, or a reference to a work rather than the
name of one.

**Name a place of publication as the publisher.** `(London, 1973)` says where
a book was published and not by whom, so `container` stays empty. The place
is still in `text`.

A rule of dashes where the author should be is the exception, and a
deliberate one: `———. *The Second Book*.` means the author of the entry above,
the style says so, and the entry it refers to is the one immediately before.
That is read and filled in.

## As a library

```rust
for one in citefind::read(&text) {
    println!("{} ({}) {:?}", one.authors.join("; "), one.year.unwrap_or(0), one.title);
}
```

`citefind::split::entries` cuts a block without reading the entries.
`citefind::parse::one` reads an entry already cut. `citefind::prompt::compose`
and `merge` are the two halves of the model-facing path, and
`prompt::PROMPT_VERSION` says which wording produced a given answer.

From Python, JavaScript or C, through
[`bindings`](../bindings/README.md):

```python
for one in catena.find_citations(text):
    print(one["year"], one["title"], one["unsettled"])
```

## See also

- [`idnorm`](../idnorm/README.md) — the identifiers it finds, checked.
- [`bibfetch`](../bibfetch/README.md) — what a register says about them.
- [`chunkmd`](../chunkmd/README.md) — which flags the chunks worth feeding it.
- [`bibclean`](../bibclean/README.md) — the same audit for a catalogue record.