Possible to use JUST the Unique ID# for citations?

[corrado33]

I'm currently looking for a way to shorten citations from bookends. I know this can be changed, but when I try to use a custom format, it never finds the correct reference.

Just for the record, I'm talking about the temporary in text citations, the ones you get before you "scan" the document.

Is it possible to have bookends output JUST the Unique ID for the reference. It'd be less obtrusive in the paper, and honestly once I put the reference in the paper, I don't need to be reminded that I put it there. I'm personally having a hard time reading the paper while wading through citations.

EDIT: Apparently if the Unique ID is included in the citation everything else is ignored for that reference, so I can safely delete the "author,journal" from the citation, however I'd still like a way of JUST outputting the ID alone.

For example, instead of having the citation look like this {Author, Journal, #Unique ID}. Just have it be like this {#Unique ID}. And multiple citations would look like this {#Unique ID1;#Unique ID2;#UniqueID3} (Which would take up a lot less space before scanning.) I'm also talking about the citations you get when you click "Copy citation" in bookends. Of course I'm not going to memorize these. Assuming the unique ID is actually Unique, this shouldn't be an issue right? But then again, searching for a unique ID in the search box of Bookends doesn't return any results, so maybe it's not possible. But it would have to be because I have many papers by the same author and in the same journal that bookends still finds correctly.

I was debating making a new "format" that would simply output the Unique ID, then selecting that in prefs. but Unique ID is not a selectable option from the drop down list (and rightfully so, it'd never appear in the final citation.)

I may be missing how to actually do this. I read the User Manual on this specific part of bookends, and didn't see any mention of it. I'll continue looking, and if I find it I'll update the thread.

[corrado33]

Ah, nevermind, I figured it out.

Apologizes. I didn't see the "Unique ID" in the "Special characters" drop down menu.

I simply created a custom format called "Citations only" and put $#$@ in the "Field Order" box.

I swear this program has so much functionality I can't even keep up.

[Jon]

Yes, that's the right way to do it.

Jon
Sonny Software