Sonny Software

Hello. It is customary in my field (humanities) to differentiate between the Manuscript, Primary, and Secondary Sources in a thesis bibliography. Now the MSS I can worry about separately, but I would like to be able to tag certain references as being primary, e.g. works by Chaucer, or Aristotle, and have them go under a Primary Source Heading, and anything not tagged go under Secondary Sources. Is it possible to do this? The alternative is to cut and paste once the bibliography has been generated, which seems a little counter-intuitive considering how powerful BE is.

Hi,

There is a field called "Orig Pub" that sounds like it is well suited for this.

I don't know what you mean by "go under a heading", though...

Jon
Sonny Software

Jon - by 'go under a heading', I think the idea is to group all of your primary source references together, and all of your secondary sources together; each section would be appropriately titled. Essentially, then, two bibliographies in one document. There are other reasons to separate references into sections like this: English language sources vs. Foreign language sources; archival sources vs. published sources, etc.

Ah, I see.

Well, you can certainly use Smart Groups to keep them separate for research purposes.

Bookends will not generate two bibliographies with one scan, however. To do this would require some manual rearrangment.

Jon
Sonny Software

Yes, that's what I thought. Joewiz is right, I mean essentially different bibliographies, though it could be one bibliography generated using different headings. If BE could generate one single bibliography from, say, two groups, that put all the items in Group A (Primary) under a heading "Group A", and all those items in Group B (Secondary) under a different heading, "Group B", this would be good. Is this customizable? Or could this be considered for another release? Or is it too much trouble for too few users? Perhaps. Thanks for the responses.

Hi,

You can't do that now. Conceivably in the future (can't say), but it certainly would add another layer of complexity, and probably require post-generation tweaking as well.

Jon
Sonny Software

Any news about this? Just wanted to remember that, at least in my research field, it would be very useful to have this reference grouping done automatically in the bibliography formatting. It could perhaps be made taking into account (some of) the groups or even labels to create the bibliography groups.

Now that I am approaching the last part of my thesis I begin to think more seriously about bibliography formatting...

Hi, no, no news. I'm working on other things.

Jon
Sonny Software

Jon wrote:Hi, no, no news. I'm working on other things.

Jon
Sonny Software

Other things as in "buying Christmas presents"?

Only time will tell...

Jon
Sonny Software