Sonny Software

I have a lengthy thesis, divided into chapters.

Is it possible to revert to "primary order" of citations at the start of each new chapter? (ie so that the first time a reference is cited in that particular chapter, the primary order is used, regardless of whether that reference was cited in a previous chapter). Or to force the primary order to be invoked somehow?

I could of course split the thesis up into a separate document for each chapter, and then scan each one separately. Unfortunately though, I'd like a single, unified bibliography at the end of the thesis. If I did separate scanning in this way, then the letters appended to ambiguous citations (2000a, 2000b etc) might not match up across the entire thesis (so I suppose a different way of asking this would be, is it possible to make ambiguous citations consistent across more than one document, to "fix" the letter to the year somehow??)

I realise this might be a "have your cake and eat it" scenario. Nevertheless, I believe it is a fairly common usage scenario: ie you want the chapters of your book to be somewhat self-contained (in case they are read out of order), so you want to make things easy for the reader by using the primary citations the first time something is cited in that chapter. At the same time, in the interest of saving paper, you want a single bibliography at the end of the book, rather than mini-bibliographies throughout the book/thesis.

Any suggestions for how people handle book-length projects in Bookends would be greatly appreciated!

Sorry, Bookends doesn't break down manuscripts by chapter (section). You can either scan the entire thesis or break it down into chapters and scan those. If anyone else has comments on how they handle a situation like yours I'd like to hear them, too.

Jon
Sonny Software

I think I might have a solution.

I've decided to break the thesis down into separate documents for each chapter, which are easier to handle anyway.

So, here's what I'll do to solve the problem of having ambiguous citations consistently having the same letter next to the year throughout the thesis [ie so that (Smith 1997b) doesn't change to (Smith 1997) or (Smith 1997c) between the different chapters]

1. make a group containing every reference in the entire thesis
(scan each chapter, create a new group from the hits list)

2. cite that group (containing every reference) at the end of each chapter using {!

3. do the scan

4. delete the resulting bibliography (and paste it into the end of the thesis)
(btw, is there a way when doing a scan to generate a bibliography, but NOT send it to Word, and just send it to the bibliography window? The "send bibliography to" option is always greyed-out as Microsoft Word when I do scan. This would make step 4 unnecessary.

I've not actually tried this yet, and it's not very elegant, but it should work right? If every chapter is citing the exact same set of references, then ambiguities would be resolved in the same way wouldn't they? from the user guide, p 164: "The letter 'a' will be appended to the date of the first reference in the alphabetized bibliography, the letter 'b' to the second reference, and so on."

You can tell Bookends to not generate the bibliography (uncheck the box that tells Bookends what to). But if you do and just generate it in Bookends afterward you won't get disambiguation (because there is no context). So cut/paste is what you want.

I'm not sure if I follow exactly what you're doing with the different bibs, but it sounds like it might work. Try it with just two chapters and see.

Jon
Sonny Software