Sonny Software

Hope anyone can help me here:

I have written a university paper, while using Mellel and BE as reference manager. Every citation in the paper has been integrated through the 'copy citation' function.
When I now try to finally scan the document, nearly every citation causes a 'ambiguous failure'. It seems to be that BE (or Mellel) only compares the date (and or author) and not the unique ID, which of course causes a lot of of ambiguous citations.
With regard to the numer of citations this manually way of document scanning would cost me hours.

can anybody help me? maybe I just have to change some preferences, but since it is the first time that I am using the integrated function of BE and Mellel I have no clue how to solve the problem.

thanks in advance
flo

Hi,

If you have used Bookend's Copy Citation, each citation should be unique, regardless of the setting in Preferences (there can be exceptions if, for example, you include the citation information of one reference in the body of another). To enure unique citations, go to Bookends Preferences and set Copy Citation to City by Author, Date, Unique ID.

Jon
Sonny Software

Wow, 3 minutes (!), what a quick response! Thanks!

But unfortunately the problem still remains. I use the Copy Citation feature with the preference 'Author, Date, Unique ID', but while scanning the document BE only scans for the date or the authors and not for the unique ID.
I also tried a complete new Mellel document with another BE database, but the problem is still the same.
Do I maybe have to use one of the database maintenance funtions?

flo

Perhaps. Try rebuilding the database and see if that helps. If it doesn't, please zip and send me your database and a small Mellel document that shows the problem. And make sure you are using the latest release of Mellel, BTW, not a beta.

Jon
Sonny Software

Thanks for sending the database. I'll answer here so that others may benefit, too.

The problem is that you set the "Multiple citations separated by" character to comma (in Preferences). So Bookends is looking at each group of characters between commas as a separate citation. Change it back to semicolon (the default) and the scan works fine.

Jon
Sonny Software

Thanks for the remarkable quick support!