Feature Request: Format/Localize dates in bibliography

[cboulanger]

Hi.

I have the problem that I need to mix books and newspaper articles in the bibliography. The books need to get cited by year (e.g. Miller, 2004), whereas the newspaper articles need to include the exact date. Example (using German date format):

Citation: As it was reported the next day (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 29.10.2010), the prime minister said in this meeting ...
Bibliography: Süddeutsche Zeitung (29.10.2010): "Prime Minister said blah blah"...

I have entered the date of the article in the "date" field in the form YYYY-MM-DD, which is an ISO standard and will ensure correct sorting. I understand from the User Guide that the date field isn't tied to any particular date standard. Bookends treats it as an arbitrary string from which it can optionally extract the year value for citations or the bibliography.

I was hoping that there was a way of using exact dates in the citation as well as in the bibliography, but I don't think this is supported by Bookends. Currently, it will use "Süddeutsche Zeitung 2010a/b/c/d" etc.and I will have to add day and month in a special field. Alternatively, I can tell Bookends to use the date as it is, adding the suffix letter, which results in "Süddeutsche Zeitung 2010-10-29b", which is also not what I want.

It would be nice if there was an option to format the "date" value according to the System preferences (OS X probably does that for you) and use it in citation and bibliography. I could remove the suffixed letter manually.

As usual, my use case is rather special, but maybe you can think about this for a future release.

Thanks!

[Jon]

The problem with dates is that there are many, many ways of entering dates, or obtaining dates from Internet sources, that cannot be parsed to a universal value. Bookends has the ability to generate true date values (for things such as date entered, modified, or synced) because it does so itself, it doesn't rely on user input. Bibliographic citations don't require exact dates (down to hours and seconds), typically just the year. If you require more precision (e.g. day and month), use other fields for that. Please see our Newspaper Type, which has fields for day and month.

Jon
Sonny Software

[ozean]

This is what I am doing too. I enter the date in ISO format in the date field whereever I have it, and for newspaper articles and online access dates I also put it into separate date fields. This is a bit of a hassle, but with so many different standards for writing a date this works well enough.

(Although I often found myself secretly wishing for an automated option after I started to consistently enter dates into the date field in ISO format. So I understand where you’re coming from.)

[Jon]

*If* the date is in a machine-readable form (i.e. can be converted to a known date format), the of course it would be possible to do anything you want with it in the bibliography. So, if you entered in ISO format, what sorts of things would you want to be able to do with it in a bibliography? Realize that there are problems I can already anticipate. For example, Bookends would use your OS settings for date and time, which may not be appropriate for the journal you are submitting to (e.g. German dates when submitting to an English journal). Also, specifying a long form (e.g. with month and day) would not be appropriate except for Newspaper Types. And dates entered as just the year would be problematic (because I believe they would be converted to Jan 1 of that year). But just to explore this further, what would format control over dates in bibliographies would you want that Bookends doesn't provide?

Jon
Sonny Software

[ozean]

I guess for almost all uses that I would encounter, non-word formats would be sufficient:

2012-04-30
12.04.2012
04/12/2012
12/04/2012

(I guess you could just check System Preferences > Language & Text > Formats for all those countries where you have a significant number of customers. The interface in the dialog for customizing the format is really really nice, btw.)

[Jon]

Thanks, but that's not what I'm asking (I know what formats can be recognized as dates and parsed). I'm asking that assuming a reference had such a recognizable date, what would you want Bookends to do with it that it can't do now? Please se my previous post for some caveats about obvious uses (such as pulling out day and month). I want to know how being able to manipulate a date (other than extracting the year, which Bookends does now) might be useful. Personally, I'm not coming up with many reasons.

Jon
Sonny Software

[ozean]

Sorry, I guess I have misunderstood your query then. But the only thing I really need would be a way to automatically parse dates (which have been entered in one standard way in all references) into these different kinds of layouts. Nothing fancy required.

[Jon]

Why? What journals require these different forms? The vast majority want just the year. And Bookends would use the settings in System Preferences, so you'd have to change that to get different date separators (e.g. "/", ".", etc.). Adding a date parsing feature would not be a trivial change to the UI, so I'm trying to see if it would really be useful or not.

Jon
Sonny Software