Sonny Software

1. Sort order of types internally

The reference types now are ordered alphabetically. If you change their names in the preferences they keep the alphabetical order of their default names.

Alphabetical order is not the worst thing, but in this case I personally would prefer another order. From my point of view the first few references should be ordered this way:
book
edited book
book chapter
journal article
review
newspaper article
dissertation

This would be much more intuitive to work with references in Bookends - at least as I think.

But much better instead of changing the order I think it would be to allow the user to change the order by drag and drop in the references-pref-tab.


2. Sort order of types in bibliographies

Another thing related to this is the order of your references in a bibliography. I don't know how this is in other fields, but in the field I'm working in it is absolutely usual (if not necessary) to order the references from the same author by type. It would be great if this would be possible with Bookends. This would need the sort order "Author, Type, Date, Title" in "Bib & Citation Options".

The most easiest implementation would be to follow the sort order the user defined for the internal order as suggested above. But this could not handle all needs correctly. Therefor I would like to suggest to add a second column in "Preferences > References > Reference Types" in which the user could insert numbers for defining the bibliography order if he wants to use this feature. The trick here would be to allow the same number for different types in order to force Bookends to sort them on the same level.



What do you think?

Reiner wrote: Another thing related to this is the order of your references in a bibliography. I don't know how this is in other fields, but in the field I'm working in it is absolutely usual (if not necessary) to order the references from the same author by type. It would be great if this would be possible with Bookends.

Doesn't a subject bibliography do this?

Jon
Sonny Software

I don't think so. First because I don't see any possibility to influence the order by type (to be honest I'm not sure if there is an order by type).

And second because the suggested features should be working in a bibliography which I want to generate from within Mellel. And this is not possible with Subject bibliographies I think.

Best regards, Reiner

Subject bibliographies can be ordered by Refrerence Type (I have assumed that's the most common type of subject bibliography).

You can do your scan with Mellel and the citations will be in the hits list. Then in Bookends create a subject bibliography with this hits and copy/paste it into Mellel.

Jon
Sonny Software

Jon wrote:Subject bibliographies can be ordered by Refrerence Type (I have assumed that's the most common type of subject bibliography).

Now I see what you mean. But that is definitely something different from what I suggested.

If I choose "Reference Type" as Subject, there are all articles and then all books. What I want is to have all works from one author together and then as second sorting criteria the type.

Also I don't see how I could influence the order of the types in subject bibliography.

You can certainly group a subject bibliography by author. But there is no secondary subsetting after that. It probably wouldn't be hard to manually copy/paste the types in the order you wanted them, but it would not be automatic.

Jon
Sonny Software

To have this done automatically is exactly what I would like to request for a future version of Bookends. While doing things manually is not bad, I think having done them automatically is the reason to use software like Bookends. And so I think this is an reasonable request though there is no need to hurry with this. I'm sure there are more important things to implement.

But anyway I would be very interested in hearing other users opinions about this.