Format a reference for display in a report.
Details
The argument bib should be a bibentry object (e.g., like those made by citation(), but it can also handle a bibtex object or a bibtex formatted character vector. If these do not read in as valid bibtex, the original text of bib will be returned unformatted.
Examples
mc <- citation("metacheck")
format_ref(mc)
#> [1] "DeBruine L, Lakens D, Werner J (2026). <em>metacheck: Check Research Outputs for Best Practices</em>. R package version 0.0.1.0, <a href=\"https://github.com/scienceverse/metacheck\">https://github.com/scienceverse/metacheck</a>."
# handles bibtext
bib_mc <- utils::toBibtex(mc)
format_ref(bib_mc)
#> [1] "DeBruine L, Lakens D, Werner J (2026). <em>metacheck: Check Research Outputs for Best Practices</em>. R package version 0.0.1.0, <a href=\"https://github.com/scienceverse/metacheck\">https://github.com/scienceverse/metacheck</a>."
paper <- demopaper()
format_ref(paper$bib$ref[1:2])
#> [1] "NULL"