Citation: how to make the automatic "dropdown" options after "@" work?

[hao-hong]

Hi all,

I am not sure if this is the best way to describe the question. A few days ago, I can create a citation in quarto by adding "@", and then there will be a dropdown menu showing available citation keys for me to choose. But this function suddenly does not work any more. I have to manually input the exact citation keys each time. Everything else works fine.

Can anyone help me here? Thank you.

Edit: I am using a .bib file. And the dropdown menu does not work in both VSCode and R-studio.

Edit 2: It turned out that I could do this on a different computer. So, it should have something to do with my laptop.

[dragonstyle]

That features uses the bibliography in the front matter of your document. Do you have a valid path to a bibliography file there?

[hao-hong]

I am not good at this. I just put the bib file in the same folder with the .qmd file. It worked before but stopped.

[dragonstyle]

No worries- happy you're using Quarto! You also need to have the bibliography listed in the document, like:

---
title: My Title
bibliography. mybib.bib
---

## Section

Is that there?

[hao-hong]

Yes. And I can export .pdf documents with citations and references without a problem. the only problem is that when I am editing the .qmd file, and if I type "@"+whatever, there is no drop down menu for me to select from a list of citation keys. I have to manually input the citation key myself.

Oddly, when I use my desktop, I can have the dropdown menu. But it stops working after like an hour. I did nothing but opened the .bib file.

[hao-hong]

For my own record, I do not know why. But if I put brackets "[" and "]" for the .bib file, the autocompletion for citations works well.

[mcanouil]

@hao-hong You are talking about auto-completion from the IDE which is unrelated to Quarto CLI itself.

Quarto extension for VSCode does not have this feature (yet).

RStudio does support this at least in the last version.
Quarto website has a page describing this feature in RStudio IDE, see https://quarto.org/docs/visual-editor/technical.html.
If you are using RStudio IDE, then you might want to update it and set it up as described in the link above.