Pandoc citations without appending the references bibliography

Question

Main Question: Is there a way to flag Pandoc to turn off appending the bibliography but still have it insert the correct inline citations?

I am writing a Markdown / Knitr document that has a main file (article.Rmd) and several "child" files that are included in the main file using Knitr's "child=" chunk option.

The child files are basically sections of the main article file, just separated for easier editing and management. Throughout these child section files, I use the citations in the Markdown text (e.g. "@author_title_1999") to cite various papers. The main file and each child file has a YAML header that provides the BibTex file location, e.g.:

---
bibliography: mybibfile.bib  
...

(Including this YAML entry more than once is not a problem; see the readme on metadata-blocks.)

When I compile the entire document using Knitr, a big Markdown document is created. I then use Pandoc with the --filter pandoc-citeproc option to manage the citations. Pandoc inserts nice citations and appends a list of the cited papers as references/bibliography. Cool.

As I write and edit the individual child sections, I use the same citation compiling which produces the correct inline citations, but unfortunately also appends the references at the end, even though it's just a section of the larger document. I would like to compile these small child sections with inline citations, but without the bibliography at the end.

Manly

It looks like the required feature has now been implemented in pandoc-citeproc. See my updated answer. – Etamine

Answer 1

I think this is possible with the suppress-bibliography metadata field first introduced in pandoc-citeproc 0.7 (released in May 2015). From the current pandoc-citeproc man page:

pandoc-citeproc will look for the following metadata fields in the input:
...
suppress-bibliography : If this has a true value, the bibliography will be left off. Otherwise a bibliography will be inserted into each Div element with id refs. If there is no such Div, one will be created at the end of the document.

(as a workaround, you can also quite easily create a custom CSL style that doesn't produce a bibliography, by deleting the cs:bibliography child element of the style. See http://docs.citationstyles.org/en/stable/specification.html#child-elements-of-cs-style.)

Etamine

Thank Rintze. The suppress-bibliography option wasn't working for some reason, but the csl workaround you suggest did for me. – Gudrin