In the new version of the bibliography format editor in Sente, you can customize what gets shown in the preview pane so that you can more easily see how a given format will behave when it is used on a document.
For an example, let's look at the Chicago 15 N (Notes) format. In this format, one does not normally include a bibliography at the end of the document, so all of the important bibliographic detail has to appear in the first occurrence of a citation. After that, a much shorter version of the citation can be used.
In this article I am not going to talk about exactly how one defines a format to work in this way. Instead, I am just going to show you how you can customize the preview pane to help you preview this behavior.
By default, the preview pane includes one version of the in-text format and one of the bibliography format. For the Chicago format in question, this would look like this:
▼ Journal Article (JA)
[edit sample data]
In-Text
John Allen Smith and others, "Fractals in Biological Systems," J Biol Chem 151, no. 22 (1999): doi:10.1006/ceth.2003.1354. http://www.jbiolchem.com/article/doi/10.1006/alpha.23.45 (accessed February 1, 2003).
Bibliography
Smith, John Allen, Randall Benjamin Jones, Alfred Carlyle Black, and Susan D. White. "Fractals in Biological Systems." J Biol Chem 151, no. 22 (1999): doi:10.1006/ceth.2003.1354. http://www.jbiolchem.com/article/doi/10.1006/alpha.23.45 (accessed February 1, 2003).
But this does not show you how the format will display a reference the second (or later) time it appears in your document. You could create a test document and scan it using this format, but that would be tedious. Instead, Sente lets you modify the preview to include an example of the in-text format when it appears in a subsequent occurrence.
To modify the previews, switch to the Advanced tab in the bibliography format editor drawer, where you will see something like this:
Here you can see that I have renamed the default In-Text context to "In-Text, first occurrence" and, using the Context Conditions pop-up menu, I set the active condition to be "first occurrence." I also created a second in-text preview and set the context to be "subsequent occurrence." One can create a preview with any combination of conditions, and the sample data will be displayed as they would appear in a real document when those conditions are encountered. When I create a preview with the condition "first occurrence in document," any element whose presence or absence depends on this condition will be turned on or off as specified.
I could have also removed the bibliography preview, given that one does not normally include a bibliography in Chicago Notes format, but I left it here in case someone finds it useful.
With these changes, the preview looks like this:
▼ Journal Article (JA)
[edit sample data]
In-Text, first occurrence
John Allen Smith and others, "Fractals in Biological Systems," J Biol Chem 151, no. 22 (1999): doi:10.1006/ceth.2003.1354. http://www.jbiolchem.com/article/doi/10.1006/alpha.23.45 (accessed February 1, 2003).
In-text, subsequent occurrence
Smith and others, "Fractals," 943-949.
Bibliography
Smith, John Allen, Randall Benjamin Jones, Alfred Carlyle Black, and Susan D. White. "Fractals in Biological Systems." J Biol Chem 151, no. 22 (1999): doi:10.1006/ceth.2003.1354. http://www.jbiolchem.com/article/doi/10.1006/alpha.23.45 (accessed February 1, 2003).
Now it is much easier to be sure that citations will be formatted correctly in the different contexts in which they appear.
You can create as many of these preview contexts as you want, and they are created on a format-by-format basis because different formats care about different things.
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