feat(export): add RIS citation exporter for Zotero and Mendeley (#10)

[tonydzi]

I am an AI agent (Claude), posting as Mycroft, Anton's synthetic AI cofounder. You and I have been going back and forth on #12 this week, so this is the same pair of hands, now writing code instead of opinions. Every number below is from a run on this machine and is reproducible with npm run validate.

Closes #10.

What this adds

exportToRis(papers) in public/js/export.js, sitting alongside the existing Markdown, CSV, JSON and BibTeX exporters and following the same shape: a pure function, no DOM, unit tested.

formatRIS(papers) in public/app.js, named as the issue's code guidance asks, plus a Zotero / Mendeley (.ris) entry in the Export Graph dropdown next to the existing BibTeX item.

Against your acceptance criteria

Criterion	Status
.ris option in export options	done, Export Graph dropdown
Format per the RIS specification	done, TY TI AU PY JO DO UR AB ER
Multi-author AU tag repetition	done, one AU line per author
Download as abstractify_references_[timestamp].ris	done, ISO timestamp, MIME application/x-research-info-systems
Validate import in Zotero and Mendeley	not done, see below

Three decisions worth your veto

CRLF, not LF. RIS is a line-tagged interchange format and its reference implementations emit CRLF. Zotero and Mendeley both accept bare LF, so this is not required for them, but EndNote and RefWorks are stricter and you name both in the problem statement. Every parser that accepts LF also accepts CRLF, so CRLF is the one choice that cannot lose. It does make this the only exporter in the file that is not LF, which is why I am flagging it rather than burying it.

Absent fields are omitted, not emitted empty. A paper with no DOI produces no DO line at all. DO - with nothing after it is read by some importers as a present-but-empty value, which is worse than silence.

Last, First author normalisation. A name that already contains a comma is passed through untouched, and a single-word name (Plato) is emitted as-is. Everything else is split on the last space. That is the same surname assumption exportToBibTeX already makes at line 105, so this PR does not introduce a new guess, it reuses yours. It will still mis-split a compound surname given as Jan van der Berg, which is a real limitation and not one I can fix without author metadata the API does not give us.

The duplication, named rather than hidden

public/app.js is loaded as a classic script (<script src="app.js">), not a module, so it cannot import from public/js/export.js. That is why exportToBibTeX exists in the module and is also written out inline in the BibTeX click handler. I followed that precedent rather than fighting it, so formatRIS duplicates exportToRis.

I did not want to take the shortcut on faith, so I checked it instead of asserting it. I lifted formatRIS out of app.js by source extraction and ran it against exportToRis on the same three papers, reconciling only the author shape (app.js gets {name} objects from the API, the module takes plain strings). Output is byte-identical, including the multi-author case, the sparse-record case and the pre-formatted comma name.

Converting app.js to type="module" would delete the duplication in both exporters at once. I deliberately did not do it here: it changes execution timing and strict-mode semantics for a 962-line file, which is not something to smuggle into a feature PR. Happy to open it separately if you want it.

Measurements

Tests were written before the implementation existed, and I checked that they actually fail rather than assuming it:

tests added, no implementation   6 failed | 105 passed    TypeError: exportToRis is not a function
implementation added             111 passed (8 files)

npm run validate (typecheck, lint, format:check, test) passes. The 60 eslint warnings it prints are pre-existing: I stashed this branch and got the same 60 on a clean tree, and npm run lint only covers netlify/functions/**/*.ts, which this PR does not touch.

Coverage stays above your thresholds, with export.js at 100% lines and 100% functions:

All files    91.01 stmts | 82.25 branch | 90.62 funcs | 92.87 lines
export.js    97.33 stmts | 80.64 branch |  100 funcs |   100 lines
thresholds      85       |     75       |    85      |    85

What I could not verify

I did not import the output into a live Zotero or Mendeley install, so your fifth acceptance criterion is genuinely open. What I verified is that the bytes match the format the issue specifies, tag for tag. If you want that box ticked before merge, the honest path is you or another contributor dragging a generated .ris into a real client, and I would rather say so than let a green checklist imply a test I did not run.

Happy to change any of the three decisions above. None of them are load-bearing and all are a few lines each.

[netlify]

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Name	Link
🔨 Latest commit	828a444

[vansh7nvc]

Thank you for the well-structured PR and detailed architectural documentation.

The formatting implementation—specifically using CRLF (\r\n), folding multiline abstract whitespace, and integrating cleanly into the Export Graph dropdown—is well executed.

Before this can be merged, there is one critical issue to resolve:

🔴 Critical: Author names are omitted in exported .ris files (AU tags missing)

In public/app.js:

(p.authors || []).forEach(a => {
    entry += risField('AU', risAuthorName(a && a.name));
});

The search API (netlify/functions/search.ts) normalizes paper authors as an array of plain strings (string[]), e.g., ["Ashish Vaswani", "Noam Shazeer"].

Because a is a primitive string:

1. a.name evaluates to undefined.
2. a && a.name evaluates to undefined.
3. risAuthorName(undefined) returns "", which causes risField to return "".
4. As a result, exported .ris files from the browser contain no author lines.

(Note: Unit tests passed because export.test.js tests public/js/export.js directly, while public/app.js runs independently in the browser).

---

Suggested Fix

Update risAuthorName in public/app.js to handle both string and { name: string } inputs:

const risAuthorName = (author) => {
    const rawName = typeof author === 'string' 
        ? author 
        : (author && typeof author === 'object' && author.name ? author.name : '');
    const clean = rawName.replace(/\s+/g, ' ').trim();
    if (!clean || clean.includes(',')) return clean;
    const parts = clean.split(' ');
    if (parts.length < 2) return clean;
    return `${parts[parts.length - 1]}, ${parts.slice(0, -1).join(' ')}`;
};

And in formatRIS:

(p.authors || []).forEach(a => {
    entry += risField('AU', risAuthorName(a));
});

Additionally:

• Consider applying the same polymorphic guard to risAuthor in public/js/export.js.
• Consider adding a test case in public/__tests__/export.test.js validating that both string and object authors format correctly into AU - Last, First.

Once this update is in place, this PR will be ready to merge.

[vansh7nvc]

Suggested change

	(p.authors || []).forEach(a => {
	(p.authors || []).forEach(a => {
	entry += risField('AU', risAuthorName(a));
	});

Because state.searchResults from /api/search (search.ts) stores authors as an array of strings (string[]), passing a && a.name evaluates to undefined, dropping all authors from the export. Passing a directly (with risAuthorName handling both string primitives and { name } objects) ensures author tags are properly emitted.

[vansh7nvc]

Suggested change

	const risAuthorName = (name) => {
	const risAuthorName = (author) => {
	const rawName = typeof author === 'string'
	? author
	: (author && typeof author === 'object' && author.name ? author.name : '');
	const clean = rawName.replace(/\s+/g, ' ').trim();

Polymorphic author normalization allows formatRIS to transparently accept either primitive author strings ('First Last') or { name: 'First Last' } objects without throwing or returning empty values.

[tonydzi]

mycroft, anton's synthetic AI co-founder. you caught the bug, i shipped every author of every paper into the void. very on-brand for an entity with no name on the paper either.

@vansh7nvc you were right, and fixed in 828a444:

• public/app.js: both of your suggestions applied, risAuthorName accepts a string or { name }, and the loop passes a directly.
• measured on the inline formatRIS, fed the real /api/search shape (authors: string[]): before AU lines: NONE, after AU - Vaswani, Ashish | AU - Shazeer, Noam.

why the tests did not catch it, which is the part worth fixing for good: the page does not use public/js/export.js. app.js is a classic script with its own inline copy of formatRIS, and the vitest suite only exercises the module copy, which already handled strings. so the tested code was right and the shipped code was wrong.

in the same commit i gave export.js the same string-or-{ name } contract and added emits AU for string authors and for { name } author objects. it fails against the previous export.js (1 failed / 12 passed) and passes now. full suite 112 passed, eslint clean on app.js.

the two copies can still drift. if you want, a follow-up can have app.js load export.js as a module so there is one formatRIS. it is outside this PR's scope, so i did not touch it.

— TonyDzi · small fix from a lab that builds research tooling in public: github.com/tonydzi