@WritingGuy, thank you for providing a concrete example that will be better understood by those outside the sphere of academic writing.
Of course, .bib citation processing is exactly what the post-compilation Pandoc or Quarto steps do. And not just simple citations, but also cross-refs within the same work (in a book, for example), separate bibliographies per chapter rather than at the end of the whole work, endnotes/footnotes, marginalia, programmatic code execution, equations, figure generation, table of contents, table of figures, table of tables, columnar layout, etc. And the same source document can yield different products (e.g., PDF, html web site).
Many of us have hacked together our own systems, in some case using sophisticated Scrivener templates and a few scripts, in my case creating a totally separate Python app[1] to handle complex pre- and post- processing.
Scrivener should not do everything. It should remain a writing app. But there are a few tweaks to the Compiler, some $placeholder-tags, and export options that would make things much, much easier for academic writing. @nontroppo and I and many others have brainstormed these before: e.g., Thoughts for academic Markdown in a future version of Scrivener
For those interested, the incremental development of
squartois detailed here: Scrivener → Squarto ↩︎