Feature: group bibliography entries by year with section headings

[michaelaye]

Problem

When rendering a full bibliography (e.g. with nocite: '@*' for a publications page), all entries appear as a flat list. For academic CVs and publication pages, it's standard to group entries by year with reverse-chronological headings:

## 2024
- Paper A ...
- Paper B ...

## 2023
- Paper C ...

There is no built-in way to do this. Users must write Lua filters that:

1. Disable citeproc (citeproc: false)
2. Manually call pandoc.utils.citeproc(doc)
3. Walk the refs div, extract years from pandoc.utils.references(doc), group entries, and insert headers

Proposed solution

A YAML option to enable year grouping:

bibliography: refs.bib
nocite: '@*'
bibliography-group-by: year
bibliography-sort: date-desc

This would instruct citeproc to insert heading elements (H2 by default) between year groups, sorted newest-first.

Alternatives considered

• Lua filter with pandoc.utils.citeproc() (current workaround; requires disabling built-in citeproc)
• Multiple nocite sections per year (manual maintenance, breaks on new publications)
• Section-bibliographies filter (groups by document section, not by publication year)

[michaelaye]

let me know if you want a working Lua filter code.

[mcanouil]

Please do not bypass the issue templates.
Feature requests are to be made in discussions: https://github.com/orgs/quarto-dev/discussions/categories/feature-requests

Also, these kind of feature requests are usually better addressed as a Quarto extension.

I'm converting it to a GitHub Discussion.