Dates in citations

[roger]

I am sure I have solved this problem before, but I have upgraded my computer and have lost my original set up.

My problem is that I want to display citations of journal articles (and books and ...) using an author-date format, with a bibliography. No problem with that. I then have a category "Manuscript" for which I want to display full details in the text, and to exclude them from the bibliography. Again, no problem with that. (Custom citation options, and include different fields for different reference types.)

The problem is that for the manuscripts, I need to uncheck the box saying "Use year-only for date", because month and day are important (eg Smith, Letter to Hume, 1770-10-25, Box 4, ...) but that means that citations of journal articles include more than just the year. I cannot work out what the solution is.

Reading through the manual, I can see only two solutions, neither of which is ideal.

(1) Check the "Export only year" box and edit my database to add a comma at the end of every date for manuscripts, so that these dates are not truncated (after making a backup of all the data first!).

(2) Erase all information other than the date from publications, leaving month and year only for Manuscripts. Again, not as tidy as customizing the export format in a suitable way.

(3) Copy all dates into another field, Check the "Export only year" box, and then use the duplicate field for manuscripts. If I do this, is there a list somewhere of fields that are not used for any reference type and which would be safe to use?

Any advice?

[Jon]

This is solved by Types like Newspaper, where the year is entered in Date, and the Month and Day are entered in user-defined field. In the format, where you want the year and date, you'd have them come one after the other, e.g. u1 d (where u1 is User1 and contains the Month and Day).

Jon
Sonny Software

[roger]

Thank you. Though I have quite a few Newspaper articles in my database, tagged as such, I had never noticed that, presumably because "Harvard" does not make use of this, and when entering data, changing the default to Newspaper article is often something I remember to do only when I have entered all the data.Sorry to have been blind to this.

You have reassured me that my third solution is as good as any other.

Roger