Using Conditional Elements, Example 1

To help people who need to create or modify bibliography formats, I will be posting some examples of how to handle the complexities one actually encounters in real-world bibliography formats.

Here is an example of how you can use conditional elements when creating or modifying a bibliography format in Sente.

In Chicago 15 AD (author-date), the formatting of volume, issue and pages for a journal article can get a bit complicated. Here are some examples of how this information can appear (in each case below ABCD=journal, volume=12, issue=34, pages=56-78):

1. ABCD 12:56-78.
2. ABCD 12 (34): 56-78.
3. ABCD, no. 34:56-78.
4. ABCD 12: doi:10.1006/berd.2006.2345.
5. ABCD, no. 34.

There are a couple of interesting twists that make this format a bit tricky:

• there should not be a space after the colon, unless both volume and issue exist
• issue is formatted differently, and is separated from the journal name by a comma, if there is no volume
• page numbers are replaced by the DOI if there is one

One way of implementing this using conditional elements would be to create a component and add the following elements to this component (in order):

1. Volume, with a prepended space
2. Issue (prepend: " (" and append: ")"), if there is a volume
3. Issue (prepend: ", no. " and append: nothing), if there is not a volume
4. static text: ": " (colon with a space), if volume, issue and pages all exist
5. static text: ":" (just a colon), if pages exist, and at least one of, but not both of, issue and volume exist
6. pages (no prepend or append text), if there is no DOI
7. DOI (no prepend or append text)
8. static text "." without conditions

This probably seems more complicated that it really is, and once this has been placed in a component, it can simply be used as a unit anywhere this is needed. And should you get it wrong in one detail or another, there is only one place where you would need to make the correction.

Now, you might be thinking that this all seems kind of complex, and you would be right. It is not as bad as it might seem, but it definitely is a bit complex. But the bottom line is that the Chicago format specification is complex, and this is about what it takes to handle it correctly.

As a point of comparison, I ran a few tests on a competing reference manager to see how it handles this very same format, and here is what I found for each of the examples above:

1. ABCD 12 56-78. (space instead of colon)
2. ABCD 12 (34): 56-78. (correct)
3. ABCD (34): 56-78. (wrong issue format)
4. ABCD 12 56-78. (missing colon, no substitution of DOI)
5. ABCD (34): (wrong issue format, extra colon, missing period)

I suspect that the format definition in this other software could be improved with a bit of tinkering (I was using the format as distributed with the product), but I wonder whether this software can be made to handle complexities like this.

Of course, Sente's built-in formats are not perfect, but we are committed to making them as accurate as we can, so we keep adding features that enable us to handle the remarkable complexities we find in the world of bibliography formats.