Sonny Software

I would like some opinions on best practices in the actual entries in the database.

My citations are from many disciplines. I would like to maintain a 'clean' database where everything is entered according to the same conventions. For instance, I am adjusting the titles of references to be strict titlecase (using Gruber's service); I am adding periods and spaces to authors' initials; I am trying to standardize on some convention for the date field: YYYY(Month).

Many of the references have DOI and arXiv locators. I'd like to put them on the main field (user 2 and user 4).

As this is a lot of work, I wonder if I am working against myself.

What do you guys do?

tedg wrote:I would like some opinions on best practices in the actual entries in the database.

My citations are from many disciplines. I would like to maintain a 'clean' database where everything is entered according to the same conventions. For instance, I am adjusting the titles of references to be strict titlecase (using Gruber's service); I am adding periods and spaces to authors' initials;

These are unnecessary. When you format, Bookends will apply Title Case (if you want) and add or remove periods (if you want).

Many of the references have DOI and arXiv locators. I'd like to put them on the main field (user 2 and user 4).

There is already a doi field (Additional Fields). As for arXiv locators, any unused field is OK. If you don't use BibTeX, use user1 (which is not used for anything else by Bookends).

Jon

I would also recommend against entering references in title case by default, since this makes it impossible to use the proper capitalization when the publisher/journal requires standard case (i.e. small case for everything except names etc., or, for languages such as German, small case except for nouns etc.).

And I agree that by now the DOI has become more and more important and I often find myself wishing it to be visible without switching tabs. (Although this is a bit less of a burden if you use Apple’s standard keyboard shortcuts for switching tabs, i.e. cmd-1, cmd-2, cmd-3 …)