Sonny Software

Yes, Jon, the issue you've just named constitutes bad MLA support. That is, from the word go it doesn't do what I need it to do. It also doesn't seem to do MLA-style "Ibid" (that is, leave the name/book out of a directly subsequent in-text citation). And of course, there is probably little hope that Bookends would ever be able to scan a line of text to see if the author's name is mentioned so as to omit it from the parenthetical reference... For these reasons, I wanted to ask the other users in this thread how they managed to do MLA with Bookends. And also for these reasons, I'm probably going to use the Chicago style with Bookends... If a section of a chapter or two gets published, I can use your MLA-style and fix it manually, but for the whole thing dissertation manuscript... Seems like about as much work as just entering the citation by hand in the first place (except, of course, it keeps track for you of what you've cited, which is helpful...)

Indeed, the only citation manager I've found that does support more or less well the complexities of in-text citation as required by MLA style is actually LaTeX/BibTeX (with the proper packages, to be sure... And did I look for those packages...).

In any case, I'd like to hear how people do with MLA styles in Bookends.

samuelas wrote:And of course, there is probably little hope that Bookends would ever be able to scan a line of text to see if the author's name is mentioned so as to omit it from the parenthetical reference...

Little hope, I'd agree. But it's not hard to manage yourself. This little snippet from the user guide might be helpful:

If the first character of a temporary citation is a - (hyphen or dash), Bookends will exclude the authors (or editors) from the final citation. For example

{-Anderson, 1994, citation information}

might appear as

(1994)


Jon
Sonny Software

Jon,

I've tried using the "-" but to no avail. It just formats it normally. (I'm using Bookends 9.1 with Mellel 2.2.7.1).

I've tried a couple of other fixes. If there is a better way to do this, please let me know. I made my own MLA citation format that includes the short title. Thus, I can just delete that information when needed. I've also checked the "For repeated citations use" box and left a space. Ideally, I should be able to leave it blank (since this adds an unnecessary space to the parenthetical citation), but it might be the best workaround for now.

best,
Sam

samuelas wrote:I've tried using the "-" but to no avail. It just formats it normally. (I'm using Bookends 9.1 with Mellel 2.2.7.1).

Hi,

This feature was added in Bookends 10. Here's the relevant bit from the release notes:

• Omit authors from final citation

If the first character of a temporary citation is a - (hyphen or dash, such as {-author, date, citation info}), Bookends will omit the authors (or editors) from the final citation. When used with an author-date format, this is identical to using a % (show date only). When used with a custom citation format, all the elements in the final citation will appear except authors/editors.


Jon
Sonny Software

I'm not unwilling to upgrade, but I've tried 10 and it won't stop trying to "fix" "ambiguous citations."

I'll need a bit more information than that. Please contact me directly with the details and we'll see what the problem is.

Jon
Sonny Software