About this site

This is a searchable index generated from the BibLaTeX files in the wujastyk/bibliographies repository — Dominik Wujastyk’s personal working bibliography for research in Sanskrit studies, Āyurveda, and the history of medicine and science in South Asia.

How it’s built

• The bibliography itself lives in biblio4-utf8.bib (and a small supplementary file, mbh-vols.bib, for the Joshi & Roodbergen volumes of Patañjali’s Mahābhāṣya), edited directly with a reference manager (Zotero/Better BibTeX) or a text editor.
• A Python script (scripts/build_bibliography.py) converts those files into two JSON indexes: assets/data/bibliography.json for the Bibliography page and assets/data/glossary.json for the Materia medica page.
• A plain JavaScript front end (assets/js/app.js) loads that JSON and does all searching, filtering, and sorting in the browser — there is no server or database involved, so the whole site is a handful of static files that GitHub Pages can host directly.
• A GitHub Actions workflow re-runs the build automatically on every push to main, so the site always reflects the current state of the .bib files.

Materia medica: plants, animals and minerals

The Materia medica page searches three glossary databases from the repository — plants.bib, animals.bib and minerals.bib — which record Sanskrit names of flora, fauna and minerals for use with LaTeX’s glossaries-extra package. Each entry is shown as English name, Sanskrit name and description. Citations inside a description link to the cited work on the Bibliography page, and cross-references link to the other glossary entry.

Searching

Plain search ignores diacritics, so kanda finds kāṇḍa and susruta finds Suśruta. Regex mode matches the text exactly as written.

What’s left out

A few fields present in the source .bib files are deliberately left out of both the search index and the “Copy BibTeX” text shown here: Zotero’s file and owner fields (local file-system paths), the creationdate/modificationdate bookkeeping fields, and the annotation/annote/source fields, which in this file are mostly personal working notes (e.g. “own copy”, library call numbers, or informal comments) rather than citation data.

Citing an entry

Every entry has a stable link — click “Permalink” under an entry (or just copy the page URL after opening it) to get a link of the form .../#entry-<citekey> that will jump straight to that reference. The “Copy citation” and “Copy BibTeX” buttons give a plain-text reference and a cleaned BibLaTeX record respectively, for pasting elsewhere.

The rendered citations use a simple generic author–date style for quick reference; they are not a substitute for a proper citation-style engine (Chicago, MLA, etc.) and haven’t been checked entry-by-entry for correctness — always verify against the original publication.