Sonny Software

Hi

I was recently repurposing a paper for publication in a different venue. This involved changing the citations from full footnotes (ie using a custom citation format) to using intext (author date) format.

This is actually something I seem to do a lot in my field, and one of the reasons why good biblio software like Bookends is so essential.

I cited a lot of book chapters in the paper, using the book chapter [book] metatype. One thing I really loved is that it automatically added the parent item (ie the edited volume that the chapters came from) to the bibliography.

However, now that I'm in (author date) format, the metatype is no longer in operation, so I lose the automatic adding of parent items into the biblio. According to the user guide (p. 168) "You can't use metatypes with the built-in numbered or author-date citations"

Of course I could explicitly cite the parent volume, using the {! (only put in biblio, exclude from main text) citation code.

Or I could create a custom citation format where all the fields are "a d" to replicate (author date) format.

But the automatic solution was so simple and elegant, so it seems a shame to hack together a workaround, and I wondered whether i was missing something.

So my question is, is there any way to have this functionality--where the parent item of the metatype (in this case the edited volume) is automatically added into a biblio--in (author date) mode?

thanks

Hi,

No, the built-in author-date citation style is hard-wired for simplicity. Of course you can easily replicate it with a custom citation format, as you noted. This is not difficult -- we do this in APA Citations. You could use that (or a modified form if you like), for example, to create your citations, in which case you can use reference metatypes.

Jon
Sonny Software

Hi Jon

Thanks for the clarification, fast as ever!

Would the parent show up in the biblio even if the custom citation does not invoke the parent? ie is it ok for the custom citation to just be "a d"? Or would it have to be "a [d]" to get the required effect?

You can use the parent in either the citation, the bib, both, or neither. They are independent (the "main" format controls the bib, the custom citation format controls the citations).

Jon
Sonny Software

I'd like to ask about the opposite problem as well:

Is it possible to exclude a given link relationship from the bibliography when in custom citation mode?

In other words, I want the parent book to be automatically included, but I don't want, say, the link relationship "original: translation" or "work: commentary" to be included, if I haven't set up a metatype for them.

Would it be possible to have a tickbox in the Links preference pane saying something like "In custom citation mode, only include link relationships that have their own metatype" or something along those lines?

Have you tried this? I just scanned a document with a cross-linked book chapter, and if there was no metatype set up for that the book was not automatically included in the bibliography (it was if such a metatype was created). If you're not seeing this, please contact tech support directly for follow up.

Jon
Sonny Software