Alphabetical order?

[kjmatthews]

When instructed to sort bibliographic entries by "Author, Title", is there any reason Bookends might think the following list is in alphabetical order?

Derrida, Jacques. Archive fever: a Freudian impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
———. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981.
———. Of Grammatology. Corrected ed. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, MA: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
———. Acts of religion. Ed. Gil Anidjar. Trans. Gil Anidjar et. al. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Seems to me the last entry should properly be the first.

Relatedly, Bookends seems to be ignoring my specifications for words to ignore in the title when alphabetizing, so the word "El" ("the" in Spanish) is being considered when sorting the following list:

Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Viking, 1998.
———. El Aleph. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1995.

Any thoughts?

[Jon]

It's hard to say without seeing the database. It's possible, for example, that there is a spurious invisible character at the beginning of the title. As for the ignore list, try removing Bookends 10 Preferences and recreate the list to see if it works now.

Jon
Sonny Software

[kjmatthews]

It's possible, for example, that there is a spurious invisible character at the beginning of the title.

It was indeed something like this (a line break after the author's name, incidentally). Thanks!

As for the ignore list, try removing Bookends 10 Preferences and recreate the list to see if it works now.

No, this didn't work, unfortunately.

[Jon]

Perhaps you can zip and send me your database and tell me what references I should look at. This really is not a good venue for tech support.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Jon]

Oh, before you send me anything, make sure you have "Use ignore list for authors" checked in your format.

Jon
Sonny Software

[kjmatthews]

Oh, before you send me anything, make sure you have "Use ignore list for authors" checked in your format.

Eureka!

[jss366]

I'm confused about this. Many of my authors names are entered unreversed (eg John Smith, not Smith, John). When listed in the Bibliography, they show up fine, inverted correctly according to my format: "Smith, J. (2009)…" etc, so Bookends is parsing the surnames correctly, but they appear in the wrong place on the list (in this example) under J not S. What am I doing wrong?

Example - the A and Bs of my bib:

Rigau, A. (2008). 'Simon says: design thinking …but wait… what is it?'
Andrews, K. R. (1971), The concept of corporate strategy, (Homewood, Ill: Dow Jones-Irwin) xviii, 245 p.
Phatak, A. and Chandron, R. (1989), 'Design Positioning for Strategic Advantage', Design Management Journal, 1 (1) (1), 25-31.
Barney, J. B. (1991), 'Firm Resources and Sustained Competitive Advantage', Journal of Management, 17, (1) (1), pp. 99-120.
Bierut, M. (2005). 'Innovation is the New Black', website accessed September 2007
Blaich, R. and Blaich, J. (1993), Product design and corporate strategy: managing the connection for competitive advantage, (New York: McGraw-Hill).

[Jon]

Bookends will make the effort to see if names are entered incorrectly and do it's best to deal with that (it will mess up with compound surnames). But for sorting it takes the straight text.

The solution is to fix the names. Bookends has a Global Change -> Standardize Names function that will do that for you. I suggest you use it (on a copy of your database first, perhaps, because it is not undoable).

Jon
Sonny Software

[jss366]

Aha, thanks Jon.
That's not quite what I expected, and I've been happily entering 100's of names unreversed, thinking Bookends coped with them either way around. But I'll correct the names, and hopefully all will be dandy.