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.

In APA 5 (APA, Fifth Edition), like all of the author-date formats, in-text citations typically look something like this: (Smith, 1997). But things get more complicated, depending on the details of the reference. For example, these are also valid in-text citations in APA 5:

1. (Smith, Jones, Black, White, and Grey, 1996) for the first occurrence of a reference, and
2. (Smith et al., 1996) for the same reference in subsequent occurrences
3. ("Summer Solstice," 1972) when there are no authors for an article
4. (Western Slope Inns, 1981) when there are no authors for a book

There are many other variations, of course, but these will do for this example. Rather than talk about all of the details of APA in-text citations, I am going to focus on the use of different author list formats for the first and subsequent occurrences, and the substitution of titles for authors.

First, the rules for in-text citations are essentially the same for all reference types, so I created a component for the complete in-text citation that I then just use for all reference types. This means that I only have to get the details right in one place.

Next, just to keep things a little clearer in my head, I created a sub-component to handle the author names and titles. This component has four elements:

• One Primary Contributors element (like an Authors element, but see elsewhere for more information) with the proper name formatting for the first occurrence of a reference in a document (e.g., up to 5 authors, then et al.). This element is set ti be used only under the condition that this is the first occurrence of the reference in the document.
• A second Primary Contributor, with the name formatting set up properly for all subsequent occurrences (e.g., up to two authors, followed by et al.), and dependent upon it not being the first occurrence.
• An Article Title element to be included only if there are no primary contributors, but there is an article title.
• A Publication Title to be included only if there are no primary contributors and no article title.

That is really the core of the strategy. The component uses which ever version of the Primary Contributors element is appropriate in context (first occurrence or subsequent occurrence), and a fall-back cascade to use article title or publication title as appropriate if there are no primary contributors.

One side note, by using Primary Contributors instead of Authors, I automatically get whatever contributors are flagged as "primary." For most journal articles and books, this would be the authors. But for any reference where I have indicated that some other contributor should be considered "primary," those contributors will automatically be used both here in the in-text citation as well as in the bibliography. So when I decide to cite a particular recording by conductor rather than composer, the format automatically handles it for me.

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 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.

New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1926.