Supercite will insert an informative reference header at the beginning of the cited body of text, which provides more detail about the original article. 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, just about any information contained in the mail headers of the original article can be inserted into a reference header.
There are a number of built-in header rewrite functions supplied
by supercite, but supercite is extensible in that you can write your own
custom header rewrite functions (perhaps using the built-in ones as
examples) and tell supercite to use your function. In fact, supercite
consults a list of header rewrite functions in the variable
sc-rewrite-header-list. You can put any rewrite function, custom
or built-in, into this list. This list has the default value:
'((sc-no-header) (sc-header-on-said) (sc-header-inarticle-writes) (sc-header-regarding-adds) (sc-header-attributed-writes) (sc-header-verbose) (sc-no-blank-line-or-header)).
When supercite is called via its hook function sc-cite-original,
it will automatically call one of these functions to insert a reference
header. The one it uses is user definable in the variable
sc-preferred-header-style. The value of this variable is an
integer which is an index into the sc-header-rewrite-list, with
the first function indexed at zero. The default value for this variable
is 1 (i.e., default values use the function sc-header-on-said when
automatically rewriting the header).