Handling ambiguous citations

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Asutu
Posts: 25
Joined: Sat Apr 16, 2016 11:05 am

Handling ambiguous citations

Post by Asutu »

Hi,

is there any built-in way, or workaround, of telling Bookends to always choose the same reference for a given citation when Bookends finds ambiguous citations?
What I mean is the following. I was compiling a bibliography for a PhD thesis (>280 references) with the "Scan Document" feature in Microsoft Word and very often Bookends found ambiguous citations like the following:
Screen Shot 2016-10-06 at 10.52.49.png
Screen Shot 2016-10-06 at 10.52.49.png (79.53 KiB) Viewed 3136 times
Some of these cases were to be cited once or twice, and these are fine, although I'm not quite sure why Bookends considers the above example as ambiguous because the author is different.
For others, however, eventually because they were influential, they have to be cited very often and I have to keep choosing "This one" more than 10x for the same reference(s).
If the temporary citations in the document are consistent, it would be great to have some way to tell Bookends to always choose the same reference for a given citation in the text. For example, in the screenshot above I would like to tell Bookends to choose the highlighted reference every time it finds the temporary citation Liti 2009 in the document.

Is this possible to do?

Thanks
Jon
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Re: Handling ambiguous citations

Post by Jon »

I don't know why the Cubillos reference was thought to be ambiguous -- maybe the name Liti was found somewhere (e.g. in the Notes or Abstract)?

I suggest that you use the Proofreading Scan feature. This goes through your document and replaces all temp citations with whatever is specified in your preferences (preferable Author, Date, Unique ID), which should be unique. All future real scans won't find ambiguous citations.

Jon
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Asutu
Posts: 25
Joined: Sat Apr 16, 2016 11:05 am

Re: Handling ambiguous citations

Post by Asutu »

Thanks for the quick reply.

Yes, Liti is also an author in the Cubillos reference so I guess that might be the reason why Bookends considered the citation ambiguous.
I wasn't aware of what Proofreading Scan was for. Just tried it and it works nicely in other future scans with the added feature that can correct potentially wrong citations in the text. But still even in the proofreading mode I had to choose "This One" multiple times when exactly the same citation for the same reference was ambiguous. I guess it would be nice to choose something like "use always this reference for citation XXXX ####".
But the Proofreading Scan works fine and it just needs to run once.
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