Feature request: Citation ID auto-generation

[cboulanger]

I organize my citations and attachments in a way that citation key and attachment name can be computed from the citation data (in most cases: Last name of author dash year dash first word of title). I really like the feature that allows to generate the name of file attachments using a format. This speeds up the process of attaching files considerably for me. Would it be possible to add an option that does that for the citation key (user1) field as well, i.e. dynamically updating the user1 field using a specified format?

Thanks.

[Jon]

Bookends already has an automatic citation key generator (enabled if BibTeX is enabled in preferences). It combines author and date, adding letters at the end if there are collisions with other keys. This can be applied retroactively by selected references and using Refs -> Generate BibTeX key.

Jon
Sonny Software

[cboulanger]

Hi Jon, thanks for the quick reply - I know that, but it is not what I need. Author-year is not enough for my purposes, I would want to generate the key using a style, just like in the case of the attachment name. That was the reason for my feature request and would make my life a bit easier. But there are certainly more important features that need to be implemented...

[Jon]

OK. I'll keep it in mind. It's not quite as simple as using a format, though, because there are lots of illegal characters in BibTeX keys. And of course there is no way to tell Bookends to truncate a title (or any other field) after X characters. So short of providing a new way to define citation keys, there would have to be strict limits on what Bookends would allow in the citation key, which might not be what you want either.

Jon
Sonny Software

[cboulanger]

Thanks Jon. You're right that I am probably abusing the BibTex citation key field for purposes for which it was not intended. I wish there were some standards for generating a unique, human-readable citation key automatically from the citation data that could be used and could eventually replace the BibTeX way of doing it. You will probably agree that AutorYear plus suffix is not a suitable way because this generates tons of ambiguous citation keys which will be valid only for each individual user's individual library. What I am trying to do to use cite keys that can be exchanged within a work group without creating confusion. I ended up using Autors-Year-Title (the dashes to make it more readable), trunkating the titel manually to the first word, with some special rules for several authors and some other exceptions. That's stil not ideal, but serves my purpose. Maybe you have a better idea. This would be another case where it would be great if bibliographic software vendors could sit together and flesh out a standard for easy exchange of data... Missing or ambiguos standards is really the biggest weakness in this industry, I think.

[Jon]

The doi is meant to be must such a unique identifier (or pmid, if you're using the biomedical or clinical literature). All uses in a group will be able to identify a reference by one of these. Of course they're not human-friendly, but you may not need that for your purposes.

Jon
Sonny Software