Sonny Software

Is there (or could there be) an operator to suppress titles in citation output? This would be very useful (at least in MLA) for when the title is referred to in the sentence prior to the textual citation. (Authors get suppressed for the same reason, but there's already an operator for that).

No, the title can't be suppressed in a citation in an ad hoc manner. I'm not sure this is a common enough issue to warrant a new metacharacter. If it's a rare occurrence, the title can be removed post-scan.

Jon
Sonny Software

Returning to this thread much later (while do final edits on my dissertation), I'd like to note that this function is much more common (in MLA) than you might think. Any time the the prose includes the title of the work about to be cited, the title should be suppressed in the parenthetical citation. Since the title of the work is not always mentioned, this is not necessarily a simple search-and-replace operation.

This is precisely the same reason that the suppress author metacharacter is extremely useful.

Anyone else care to comment? Also, you can't combine metacharacters. So if this were added, would one want to suppress both authors and title? Or just title?

Jon
Sonny Software

Jon wrote:You can't combine metacharacters. So if this were added, would one want to suppress both authors and title? Or just title?

This I did not know. My guess is author and title.

Depending on the citation stye used, it might well be that one would omit both author name and title in a footnote.
The in-house style used where I work requires this.
I think it would be a good idea to include the possibility.
For what its worth,

Declan

Hello,

I can confirm that this metacharacter to suppress author and title would be useful to me. It is quite frequent in the styles used in Europe.
Thanks
Jules

Sounds like I should implement this...

Jon
Sonny Software

julesmim wrote:I can confirm that this metacharacter to suppress author and title would be useful to me. It is quite frequent in the styles used in Europe.

That’s my impression for the humanities in Europe too…

NEW in Version 11.3.4 (December 23, 2012)
• Automatically exclude author and title from a citation or footnote

Thank you!