Equivalent of LaTeX \citeyear option

[mhaffner]

I'm using Rmarkdown to produce an .html file, and I'm looking for an equivalent to LaTeX's \citeyear option but haven't found anything that works. I did see this in the documentation:

It is possible to cite in parentheses by ‘year’ using Citep(bib, year = "1899", .opts = list(cite.style = "alphabetic")) [Wil99]. However, it looks like it just retrieves all articles from that year:

BibOptions(check.entries = TRUE,
           bib.style = "authoryear",
           cite.style = "apa",
           style = "markdown",
           hyperlink = TRUE,
           dashed = FALSE)

bib <- BibEntry(bibtype="Article", key = "barry1996", date = "1996-08",
title = "A Diagnostic to Assess the Fit of a Variogram to Spatial Data",
author = "Ronald Barry", journaltitle = "Journal of Statistical Software",
volume = 1, number = 1)

bib <- c(bib, BibEntry(bibtype="Article", key = "jerry1996", date = "1996-08",
title = "A Diagnostic to Assess the Fit of a Variogram to Spatial Data",
author = "Ronald Jerry", journaltitle = "Not Real Articles",
volume = 1, number = 1))

Citep(bib, year = "1996", .opts = list(cite.style = "alphabetic"))

Produces

"<a name=cite-barry1996></a><a name=cite-jerry1996></a>[[Bar96](#bib-barry1996); [Jer96](#bib-jerry1996)]"

I would like to be able to use something like

Citeyear(bib, "barry1996")

And see something like

"[(1996)](#bib-jerry1996)"

Is this possible at the moment?