How can i include a citation inside a caption of a table generated by "kable"?

[piiskop]

Sometimes, it's necessary to cite the source where a table's data come from. And usually, i use kable for creating tables. In bookdown, i can do it be declaring a text reference using (ref:[---])@[---] and refer to that text using paste0 as instructed it in bookdown's instructions. This doesn't work with quarto. It isn't even documented in quarto's instructions. How can i cite something inside a caption whose table is generated using kable?

[jjallaire]

There are no special hacks required, you can use markdown citations anywhere. So the following both work:

```{r}
library(knitr)
kable(head(pressure), caption="Pressure [@spacean2000]")
```

```{r}
#| tbl-cap: Pressure [@spacean2000]
library(knitr)
kable(head(pressure))
```

Docs on citations here: https://quarto.org/docs/authoring/footnotes-and-citations.html

Docs on table captions w/ computations here (note that tbl-cap is the technique demonstrated as that works w/ all table output -- unlike kable some table generation packages don't actually have a caption option!): https://quarto.org/docs/authoring/tables.html#computations

[piiskop]

Your examples are legit. However, once i let read in kableExtra, even your examples don't work anymore. However, using references in captions using kableExtra works in bookdown. i use kableExtra for kable_styling.

[jjallaire]

That's likely because kableExtra is emitting raw HTML which of course the markdown doesn't resolve in (thus the ref backdoor you mentioned in bookdown). We indeed do not currently have an equivalent back door. We will be investing considerably more effort into tables this fall which will probably lead to more of the kableExtra features being natively available.

[Minh-AnhHuynh]

Unless I'm missing something, I would like to add that the Quarto option can appropriately format citations (@reference stays raw) but can't do short captions, while kable can do caption.short but fails to cite... there's no win there. I'll have to hard code my citation in the meantime. This is for tables specifically from an R computation chunk. For regular tables since to my knowledge, quarto doesn't support short table captions, I use raw latex in the meantime.