temporary citation marker w/ a, b, c...

[jb]

Is it possible to generate a temporary citation marker that uses author surname and date, followed by a, b, etc. if needed to disambiguate?

I guess not, since the a, b, etc. would then need to be part of the reference record. But I'm hoping there might be a way.

[Jon]

No, the temp citation marker can't use a, b, etc. But the *final* citation will use these disambiguators (I think I just made up a word). Why do you care about the temp citation?

Jon
Sonny Software

[jb]

I prefer shorter (as well as meaningful and unique) temp citation markers.

E.g.
{Jones 2004a} instead of {Jones 2004 66438}

It's a small thing, but makes reading/editing a tad easier I think.

[Jon]

Realize that the temp citation marker must the information that Bookends needs to find the reference in the library. Therefore, the shortest possible citation that would be unambiguous would be the unique id: {#343234}. Bookends adds more than that, by default, to make the citation friendlier for humans. But you can create a temp citation yourself that will look anyway you like with a format (just don't use a journal format, which will fail for lots of reasons).

You can't use a letter with a year because there is no context. The appended letter, which disambiguates final citations, only appears after a scan when Bookends has resolved the citation against all the others in the document (and of course the appended letter can change as citations are added or removed from the document). It has no meaning before a scan. And in fact, since there is no date "2010a" in your library, it will actually cause the scan to fail if you use it in the temp citation and there is no unique id.

I hope this is clear.

Jon
Sonny Software

[jb]

Thanks, Jon. I understand all of that and in fact I do use a custom citation marker.
I wondered only because I've seen this functionality elsewhere and thought it might be possible in Bookends.

The problem, for me anyway, with unique ID alone is that it's not meaningful, and as it's not possible to see that number in the reference list it can be a small nuisance to track down a reference if that's all you've got.
I was hoping that maybe the a, b, c in conjunction with name and date could provide the equivalent of a unique ID.

Thanks for explaining.

[Jon]

OK. BTW, you can insert the a, b, etc. yourself if you want manually in the temp citation for whatever reason as long as the temp citation as a unique id. The unique id overrides any text to give you the correct reference. It there is no unique id, however, Bookends must rely on the text to identify the reference, so nothing that doesn't actually appear in the reference is allowed (or you'll fail to get a match).

Jon
Sonny Software