Use year-only for repeated authors with Custom Citation Opt

[ttasovac]

Dear Jon,

it seems to me that there is no way to use year-only for repeated authors if one creates a custom citation option.

My custom citation format is basically author-date, but I have to use it because I need original dates of publication in addition to modern editions. In the basic author-date styles, you give this option to use year-only for repeated authors so that we can avoid citations like this:

(Author 1989, Author 1990, Author 1991)

and get

(Author 1989, 1990, 1991)

which is indeed much more elegant.

I know I could suppress author names on individual citations, but that is much less convenient if you have to do it all the time by hand.

So, my question is: could you implement the option for year only in custom author-date citations?

All best,
TT

[Jon]

I can't see how. The problem is that custom citations is extremely flexible and can use any fields -- author date is a single case. I suppose it might be possible to suppress *all* information except the year, regardless of what the citation should look like. But that would cause problems if the author were the same but the title and such were different (you would not want Bookends to use just the year in that case). That's why we restrict this to author-date citations.

Jon
Sonny Software

[ttasovac]

Yes, but if my custom citation looks like this:

Code: Select all

a {u11/}d

i.e. if it only uses author, date and original publishing date -- shouldn't that be enough for Bookends to figure out that this is in fact a modified author-date set-up? No titles or anything else that could get confusing.

[Jon]

Easy for humans, not for machines. Building is special logic for that is complex and would simply make code that is already extremely complicated more so.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Jasso]

Could I bring this old topic back up. This is my number one problem with Bookends at the moment. Just like the previous user, I would like to show two dates for some citations: the year of the edition I am using, and the original date of publication. I am also using a custom field for this (u11). This works brilliantly for the bibliography with just a slight modification to the formats. So a (d|~/~u11) t… produces a bibliography line like:
Husserl, E. (2001/1901) Logical Investigations. Vol. 2. Routledge, London.

But I've been struggling for ages trying to get this work with in text citations. And yes, I can get it to work with:
a d|~/~u11

which produces nicely:
Husserl (2001/1901)

But totally wrecks any citation with repeated works from the same author, because it doesn't suppress the repeated author name:
(Husserl 2001/1901; Husserl 2001/1900; Husserl 2002/1911; Husserl 2012/1913)

Of course, I can start editing the citations manually
{Husserl, 2001, #37984;-Husserl, 2001, #69130;-Husserl, 2002, #33511;-Husserl, 2012, #53844}

But this is just, frankly, too much hassle. Especially knowing how nicely usable the automation is in the built-in citation system. So, for now it has been either or.

Considering that this kind of citation is quite common and required in many places, perhaps you could find a way to make it work?

You stated that this is made difficult by the complexity of custom citations. Well, how about approaching this problem from a different angle? I mean, what we need is basically just a common extension to the normal author–date system. So how about adding it to the built-in options of that? Add something like this to Author–Date options:

Mark original publication year: [*dropdown list of userfields*]
(Just put "No" on the top of the list, and make it default, so other users won't even notice the change.)
Prefix original pub. year: [*freetext field*]
Suffix original pub. year: [*freetext field*]

This would probably take care of the most common styles like (Husserl 2001/1901) and (Husserl 2001 [1901]) and would probably accommodate for lot of other custom styles too.

Of course, this could also be streamlined a bit if you would consider assigning one of the user fields permanently to "Year originally published". Maybe not a bad idea considering that this is such a common thing?


(Or... have you already taken care of this whole issue, and I just haven't found it yet?)

[Jon]

There is already a field called Orig. Pub. for that purpose (and you're using it -- u11).

As for this being a common requirement -- actually, it's quite a specialized requirement. That doesn't mean it's not important in your work, it's just that it is not commonly used by the large majority of our users (you can immediately exclude those in the sciences, for example).

As you note, there is a solution (use the - in front of citations where you don't want the author output). You say it's too much trouble, but I wonder how many times you actually have to resort to it in a manuscript. It seems a small price to pay to get the granular control over the appearance of the final paper.

I can't make Bookends automatically deal with every possible bibliography twist and turn. Not only are there too many to possible account for, it would make working with formats so complex and daunting that the average user be feel lost (it's already intimidating to some). The ad hoc ability to exclude the author name provide what you need without adding any complexity for anyone else.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Jasso]

Well, I wasn't trying to argue what's common and what's not. And I totally understand that you can't accommodate for everything and everyone. Like you said, this is an issue for mostly arts, humanities, social sciences, etc. softer stuff. And sure, my example was a bit exaggerated. But it can and does happen.

I just thought that implementing it like this, into the default Author–Date options, would:

• Be fairly easy.
• Make Bookends more useful to the softer disciplines.
• Make Bookends actually more intuitive and less confusing. I mean, if you are worried about the GUI, you can make the prefix & suffix fields hidden until the first option is chosen. It would then only add one fairly self-explanatory option. Considering how many options there are already (which totally get me confused every now and then anyway) I don't see the this as a huge difference.

... and additionally, in general…

• Anything that Bookends can do for the user, instead of making them do manual edits, makes Bookends more useful.

Like I said, so far I've just been doing either or. I kind of gave up on this thing a couple of years ago. The biggest problem with the either/or method is that I need to decide in advance which way to do it before I start writing. Because I have to keep in mind whether I need to do manual edits or not.

But sometimes I'm reminded of how silly it is that the option isn't there. Especially if I end up digging out older texts of mine. In the worst case, I end up using lot of time going through and editing citations manually – in otherwise completely finished texts.

And, I kind of can't see... why not? So there, that was my 2 cents.