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## 4 Reference Headers

Supercite will insert an informative reference header at the beginning of the cited body of text, which display more detail about the original article and provides the mapping between the attribution and the original author in non-nested citations. Whereas the citation string usually only contains a portion of the original author's name, the reference header can contain such information as the author's full name, email address, the original article's subject, etc. In fact any information contained in the info alist can be inserted into a reference header.

There are a number of built-in header rewrite functions supplied by Supercite, but you can write your own custom header rewrite functions (perhaps using the built-in ones as examples). The variable `sc-rewrite-header-list` contains the list of such header rewrite functions. This list is consulted both when inserting the initial reference header, and when displaying electric references. See Electric References.

When Supercite is initially run on a reply buffer (via `sc-cite-original`), it will automatically call one of these functions. The one it uses is defined in the variable `sc-preferred-header-style`. The value of this variable is an integer which is an index into the `sc-rewrite-header-list`, beginning at zero.