Sonny Software

To do this in Endnote, I basically had to type the author name myself and exclude it from the citation form, so the Endnote citation was just (1998a, 1998b), leaving me free to make all the typos I could manage in the authors' names. I've been puzzling over the formatting for a while, and I'm not seeing a good way to do this.

There are a few things demonstrated in the title text here:

Ideally (this is what I do by hand):

Lastname (year)

or for multiple citations

Lastname (year1, year2)

If the years are the same,

Lastname (year1a, year1b)

If the Lastname is ambiguous within the bibliography between two authors, then include the initials:

Lastname, F. (year1)

Finally, no parens in parens, so if I'm in a parenthesized statement already, just

Lastname year

(with all the caveats above).

It seems that the normal option only allows parens around the whole thing: (Smith 1990) rather than Smith (1990), and the custom formatting options seem to be not designed to take a citation list into account (all options appear to be for one reference in isolation), so I can't set options for "year only for repeated authors" etc.

I don't even know if Bookends is capable of checking for the ambiguity of surnames.

The only workaround I've found is pretty suboptimal: Custom citation format: "d", and then I have to do most of this manually:

Smith, M. ({smithpaper 1990; smithpaper2 1992; smithpaper3 1992})

I also found that it did not seem to order a's and b's according to order of mention, so I got something like "Smith M. (1990, 1992b, 1992a)". It appeared to match the order in the Bookends database, but I couldn't find a way to reorder them there either.

I'm very new at this, I both hope and fear that I'm asking an obvious question -- but I have been "reading the flippin' manual" for a while now, and if this is easily answered (either by "can't do it", "coming in the next version", or "it's easy, do this:"), it would seem to be a better use of the planet's collective time.

Thanks in advance for any hints.

Hi,

You've listed a lot of things. I'll make a few comments and then perhaps we can narrow things down.

1. You can cite just by date by preceding the citation with a %:

{%Smith, 2006, whevever; %Jones, 2001, more whatever}

It's up to you to manage the authors in the text, in that case, of course.

2. Bookends let's you enter "quoted text" in a citation like this:

{for revew see \Smith, 2006, whatever\, which summarizes the topic well}


3. The "a", "b", etc. after a year is not by order cited, but by listing in the bibliography (so you can cite 2006b before 2006a in the text).

Jon
Sonny Software

Quick response, thanks! And this I think made me believe that I will be able to do what I need to do. Also: I was clearly concentrating on the wrong part of the user guide -- I see now where these are documented.

Jon wrote:1. You can cite just by date by preceding the citation with a %:

{%Smith, 2006, whevever; %Jones, 2001, more whatever}

It's up to you to manage the authors in the text, in that case, of course.

Although in my dream world, it might be nice to be able to set it up so I didn't have to manage the authors myself, Endnote did no better on this front. And I have spell-check. So, easily enough accomplished.

Jon wrote:2. Bookends let's you enter "quoted text" in a citation like this:

{for revew see \Smith, 2006, whatever\, which summarizes the topic well}

This didn't work for me, though maybe phpBB ate some of your backslashes. It worked when I put a backslash after the opening { and for good measure before the closing } as well. But, the function is there, though having discovered {*ref}, I might prefer to leave it as

(for review see Smith {*%Smith, review}, which summarizes the topic well.)

so I can more easily edit the surrounding text.

Jon wrote:3. The "a", "b", etc. after a year is not by order cited, but by listing in the bibliography (so you can cite 2006b before 2006a in the text).

Right, yes, agreed. I think what I wanted isn't feasible or sensible -- in the meantime, I found the "alphabetize references" options in the format menu, and I think it's designed to do what I want. (I think I found a bug, though, which I'll post in the appropriate forum.)

Anyway, thanks again for the quick response. I think I've built up enough confidence to switch away from Endnote.

Jon wrote:2. Bookends let's you enter "quoted text" in a citation like this:

{for revew see \Smith, 2006, whatever\, which summarizes the topic well}

This didn't work for me, though maybe phpBB ate some of your backslashes. It worked when I put a backslash after the opening { and for good measure before the closing } as well.

Yes, sorry, I mistyped. You need the opening backslash, but the closing one should be optional:

{\for revew see \Smith, 2006, whatever\, which summarizes the topic well}

Jon
Sonny Software