Suppressing year?

[Jasso]

Is it possible to suppress year in citation? So it only leaves the author? I didn't find a way in the manual.

Perhaps the idea sounds silly, but I feel it would be a nice addition to the other citation modifiers. This would sometimes be useful when you are rewriting passages, which can happen several times. In some cases you want to write open the citation (hence getting rid of the parentheses) which basically means deleting the Bookends citation and just writing it as a normal text.

But for my own work, for the very likely new edits in the near future, as well as for possible future uses, I would like to keep the Bookends citation there in the text.


So for example, a normal writing process might be something like:
1st version: Grounded theory started in the late 1960s (Glaser & Strauss 1967) ...
2nd version: Grounded theory was introduced by Glaser & Strauss (1967) ...

Now both of these I can just do with modifying the Bookends citation. But if I then end up rewriting it as:
3rd version: Grounded theory was launched by Glaser & Strauss in 1967 ...

So now I delete the Bookends citation and just write it as normal text. But! What if later I need to rewrite it so that once again it has a proper citation?! If I could suppress the year, I could just keep on working with the text without the need to jump again to Bookends and finding the citation from my database. (Especially if it happens to be the only time this particular work is cited.)

I guess, basically I have learned to treat all the names in my texts as links to my Bookends database.

[ozean]

What you can do in such a case is to suppress the whole citation from showing up in the formatted text (but it would still remain in the "code" version). Would that help?

[Jon]

ozean is right. There are innumerable permutations you could come up with, and you can't have metacharacter modifiers for all of them. But you can enter them in the body of the text as you like and insert an "invisible" citation by preceding it with !

{!temp cite}

so Bookends will realize it's there and add the reference to the bibliography (if you are generating one) and remove the temp citation when you scan.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Jasso]

Point taken. I agree that you can't accommodate for every possible permutation.

Thanks for reminding me of invisible citations!

Fiddling around with it, I realised that another way to do this is to suppress the author and the parentheses, so the citation will just leave the year. Does the same thing, but with no "invisible" elements. (Usually I have Mellel on live-bibliography, or just scan frequently, and without citation highlighting so it's better not to hide stuff. I would just forget them.)

Anyway, one more way that Bookends is providing exactly what I need for my writing process.