Sonny Software

I am submitting to a journal whose style guide asks for the following:

"where you are abbreviating the title in subsequent citations, give the abbreviation in square brackets, thus:

T. Brickhouse and N. Smith, Socrates on Trial [Trial] (Princeton, 1981), 91–4."

So I know how to set this up in my custom format for the journal so that it will ALWAYS include the short title within square brackets:

FIRST OCCURANCE:
a, ‘t’ [‘s’], f, v$, no. $i` `(d) p-.
SUBSEQUENT:
a, ‘s’, p-.

But I don't know how (if possible) to tell Bookends not to include the short title in the First Occurance if there doesn't happen to be any Subsequent Occurance, which is what the style guide seems to require.

Any ideas?

You're right, you can't. You can conditionally alter the appearance of a citation depending on the presence or absence of a field's metadata, but not on conditions that arise when scanning such as this. The only way I can think of doing this is to have a short title entry only for references you are going to cite more than once. That's kind of labor intensive, though, and may require reworking when you submit to another journal.

So I see three choices.

1. Do as I mentioned above.
2. Fix the titles as necessary post-scan (how much work that is depends on how may references you cite multiple times. And you can't rescan).
3. Just do a normal scan and see if the journal's copy editor will take care of that sort of thing. They often will, in the sciences at least, don't know about humanities journals.

Jon
Sonny Software

Thanks Jon. I think I'll see if the editor is flexible enough to tolerate the short title in all cases.

G

Hi Jon,

I thought of another way to do it. I can duplicate the styles and make a version that includes the short title in the first citation and a version that does not. And then just classify my references appropriately. But in order to do this easily, it would help to be able to tell which references are repeated and which ones are not. I don't imagine a log file or something like that is produced when I scan a word file so I can take a look at that?

G

No, there isn't any kind of statistical breakdown of the scan. After a scan every reference cited will be a Hit, which may help a bit in telling you which references to check in the document. What you might do as a workaround is to make a duplication of that format and, in the "subsequent" order field, have Bookends output some tag, like "Subsequent Cite". Like this:

$Subsequent Cite$

Do the scan, then in Word do a find for "Subsequent Cite". You'll quickly find all the references that are affected.

Close the Word document without saving. Then add a short title to those references. When you scan with the real format, you'll get what you want.

Jon
Sonny Software

No, there isn't any kind of statistical breakdown of the scan. After a scan every reference cited will be a Hit, which may help a bit in telling you which references to check in the document. What you might do as a workaround is to make a duplication of that format and, in the "subsequent" order field, have Bookends output some tag, like "Subsequent Cite". Like this:

$Subsequent Cite$

Do the scan, then in Word do a find for "Subsequent Cite". You'll quickly find all the references that are affected.

Close the Word document without saving. Then add a short title to those references. When you scan with the real format, you'll get what you want.

Jon
Sonny Software

Great idea. That should do the trick.

G