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Designing Formats to use Ibid.

By Michael on September 10, 2008 10:07 PM | No Comments
One of the recent changes to the Sente bibliography format editor was in the way Ibid is handled.

There is now a format-wide setting (in the General tab in the format editor) that indicates that the format uses the term "Ibid." or some variation when the same reference is cited twice in a row in a document.  This flag can also be used in cases where citing the same reference twice in a row does not use Ibid, but most of the details of the reference are to be omitted.  More on this below.

In the simple case, you might want something like this:

4. Perry, Gillian, and Michael Rossington. Femininity and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture. Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press, 1994, pp. 37-38.
5. Ibid., pp. 82-84.

To achieve this, you need only check the Use Ibid box in the General tab in the format editor, and enter "Ibid." into the text box found there.

In this case, everything will just work as one would hope.  Specifically, when a citation is repeated, Sente will automatically suppress every element in the selected format except for Cited Pages.

If you need the format of the Cited Pages element to vary depending on whether the citation has been repeated, you can add more than one Cited Pages element to the format, and make one apply in the context of "Ibid" and the other appear in the context of "not Ibid".  For example, if you needed a preceding comma normally, but not one in the case of Ibid, you would need to create two Cited Pages elements and apply the correct conditions.

Chicago 15 N (Notes) is a good example of using Ibid in this way.

A variation on this can be found in Chicago 15 AD (Author-Date).  Here is a portion of a document with the temporary citation tags in place:

and {Perry 1994@32} now is the time {Perry 1994@56}


Note that different pages are being cited, but the reference is the same.  After scanning in Chicago 15 AD, the result is:

and (Perry and Rossington 1994, 32) now is the time (56)


In this format, repeated citations do not actually use the string "Ibid." but everything other than cited pages is left off the second citation.  In this case, the text box after the Use Ibid box is left empty to indicate that the citation details (other than cited pages) should be replaced with nothing.



Unlearning "occurrences"

By Michael on August 23, 2008 8:51 PM | No Comments
People who either created or modified bibliography formats in older versions of Sente had to understand what we called "occurrences" in order to accomplish many goals.  Unfortunately, this concept now needs to be "unlearned" to use the new version of the bibliography format editor.  This article is intended to help people make the transition from the concept of "occurrences" to the ideas that replace it.

One of the problems that both the old and new approaches are addressing is the fact that the more complicated formats (like APA, Chicago, etc.) require that references be formatted differently depending on the context in which they appear.  For example, some formats call for a complete version of the reference the first time it appears in a document, and an abbreviated version everywhere else.  Some formats want the in-text citation to use only the author name, but in contexts where this is not sufficient to identify the correct reference, they include the title (or a portion thereof).

Prior versions of Sente supported this by allowing you to specify exactly which contexts, or occurrences, a style cared about (most only cared about a few) and then it allowed / required you to create completely different formats for each one.  For example, if a format required different contents for the first vs. subsequent occurrences of a reference, one would add the "subsequent" occurrence to the format definition, and then specify exactly how references should appear in this case.  Often the definitions for many occurrences were very similar, differing in only a few details.

We have now changed this approach fundamentally.  Now, instead of a potentially large number of "occurrences," a bibliography format in Sente only includes one in-text and one bibliography format for each reference type.  And the format definition for each of these can contain elements whose appearance is conditional, based on the context in which the reference appears.  That is, there is one in-text format for journal articles in each bibliography format definition.  This single format might include, say, two versions of the author list: one for the first appearance and the second for all other appearances, but all of the other details are specified only once.  This approach eliminates a lot of redundant work, and I know from experience just how hard it was to keep this redundant information in sync.

Here is another way to look at it.  If you read my last post (about customizing the preview display), you will see that it is possible to set things up so that there are two different versions of the in-text format displayed.  (My example in that post was first and subsequent appearances.)  In the old version of Sente, these would have been specified completely independently.  In the new version, they are each a version of the single, in-text format specification.  Because this specification contains some elements that appear and disappear based on the context conditions, the specification can result in two or more very different outputs for any one reference, thus the need for two different previews.

Now when you want to modify a format to behave slightly differently in a different context, you can leave untouched all of the elements that stay the same, and only apply conditions to those elements that should be different from one context to the next.

While it may take some time to adjust to this new approach, having personally recreated the most complex formats using the new approach, I can say that I think the new approach is much better than the old one.  This change, along with all of the other recent changes to the bibliography format editor, makes creating and maintaining complex formats much easier than it has even been before.

Customizing the Bibliography Format Preview

By Michael on August 22, 2008 12:29 PM | No Comments

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:

Picture 10.png

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.

Using Conditional Elements: Example 2

By Michael on August 22, 2008 11:41 AM | No Comments

Here is another example of how using conditional elements in bibliography definitions can save a lot of time, and produce better results than you are likely to get without them.

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.

Using Conditional Elements, Example 1

By Michael on August 21, 2008 5:19 PM | No Comments

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.

Introducing Bibliography Format "Components"

By Michael on August 20, 2008 12:09 PM | No Comments
One of the most powerful new features in the bibliography format editor in Sente 5.6, is the ability to create and use "components."

Components are just like format specifications for any reference type, except that, once created, components can be used in other format specifications just like the built-in elements.

For example, most formats have a standard way of presenting publication details such as the name of the publisher, the place of publication and the year of publication.  In Chicago NB (Notes + Bibliography) it looks like this:

New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1926.

The rule for even this rather simple set of information get a little complicated (e.g., how do you format it if you do not know the place of publication?), and the format is used for most reference types.

In prior versions of Sente, you would have had to specify all of the rules each time you wanted this information to appear.  This was very tedious.

In the new version of Sente, you can create a component called, say, "Publication Details" and simply include that component wherever you want this information to appear.

Not only does this greatly speed up the creation of consistent formats, but should you find a problem in the definition of a component, all you need to do is to modify the component and the new version will be automatically used everywhere.

It takes some time to figure out exactly what should be a component, but the new versions of APA, MLA and Chicago make extensive use of components, so you can look at the for some ideas about how components can be used.

Introducing "Primary Contributors"

By Michael on August 19, 2008 4:59 PM | No Comments
Sente 5.6 introduced a new concept used in defining bibliography styles, called "Primary Contributors," that I would like to explain.

Most formats (like APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.) are flexible about exactly which contributor(s) should be placed first in bibliography entries.  For example, when citing a movie, one could list it by director, producer, screen writer, actors, or just by title, depending on the purpose of the citation.

In the past, Sente handled this by requiring the user to place these contributors in the Author role in the list of contributors, and (in most cases) the authors were placed first in the bibliography entry.  This approach has many obvious problems and in this round of revisions we introduced the concept of Primary Contributor to address them.

In this new version, one would enter all of the contributors that you care about in the reference in Sente.  Then, select the Role that you want to be considered "primary" in the Primary Contributor Role pull-down menu (e.g., "Director").  

Then, if your selected bibliography style has been designed to use Primary Contributors, the names with the specified role will be listed first in the bibliography entry for that reference.

For example, here are two versions of one reference in MLA 3 format.  The only change that was made between generating these two entries was to change the value selected in the Primary Contributor Role menu.

Here is the entry with Composer as primary:

Sondheim, Stephen, comp. Passion. Cond. Paul Gemignani. Orch. Jonathan Tunick. Perf. Donna Murphy, Jere Shea, and Marin Mazzie. Angel, 1994. CD.


And here is the same reference with Conductor as primary:

Gemignani, Paul, cond. Passion. Comp. Stephen Sondheim. Orch. Jonathan Tunick. Perf. Donna Murphy, Jere Shea, and Marin Mazzie. Angel, 1994. CD.


Note that in each case, the list of other contributors does not include the primary contributor.  This behavior is automatically handled by Sente (i.e., if the style uses Primary Contributor, and the selected primary role is "Editors," then any regular Editors element will not render any content.

When creating a bibliography format, instead of starting each bibliography format with, say, an Authors element, use a Primary Contributors element instead.  For most references this will default to being the same thing as Authors, but when a reference has a different primary contributor role specified, that will be used instead.

The text "comp." and "cond." are style-specific and so must be provided by the user in the Primary Role Description field.  We should be able to automate this in a future release, but for now this is how it is handled.

In general, I would recommend that you always define styles in terms of Primary Contributor, rather than specific author roles like Authors, Editors, etc.  Used in combination with components (described elsewhere) this makes it possible to create very flexible bibliography formats with little effort.

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