Biblography Styles

[Alireza]

Hi everyone.
I suggest that it would be very useful if Microsoft embed mor styles in
biblography section. It is better that contain all style that Endnote X
software has, become embeded in word and then importation of references items
from Google scholar become available.

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http://www.microsoft.com/office/com...25a0d6&dg=microsoft.public.word.docmanagement

 

[Bob Buckland ?:-\)]

Hi Alireza,

It's a excellent suggestion, but one that isn't, unfortunately, likely to happen I fear, unless one of the 'new batch' of graduates
or intern hires at Microsoft might create them. The folks that helped create that feature for Word 2007 have left the Word team
and moved to http://officelabs.com and while the MS folks are probably working on improving the next version there doesn't seem to
be too much left over for what used to be called 'sustaining engineering' work (i.e. working on the released product to keep it
fresh, alive and active).

The feature is basically written in XML, so it's 'extensible' and there have been a couple of efforts at making translators to move
the formats between BibUtils and other reference software and I suspect there was an expectation that folks at various schools where
there are folks who might be able to 'whip out quick XML' would be publishing additional .XSL files for different formats that could
be shared and simply dropped into the Bibiliography folder for use by Word 2007 users, but as with other similar
efforts/expectations, this hasn't happened and Microsoft really hasn't been a lot of help on doing this beyond one or two 'how to
get started' articles.

Microsoft Research has a Word 2007 add-in to work with NLM/NLH citations within Word but even there the add-in does some really poor
things, such as rename the 'Add-Ins' tab in Word for its own use, even though it leaves the content from other addins there.
================
Hi everyone.
I suggest that it would be very useful if Microsoft embed mor styles in
biblography section. It is better that contain all style that Endnote X
software has, become embeded in word and then importation of references items
from Google scholar become available. >>
--

Bob Buckland ?
MS Office System Products MVP

*Courtesy is not expensive and can pay big dividends*

 

[DiSSo]

Wish I had known that before I wasted my money on purchasing office. The
bibliographic features are nice, but it's obvious that whoever designed them
has not recently been a student. There is no way to cite online achedemic
periodicals such as those from Jstor. The Web site option has no fields for
journal name, issue, and edition, and the journal option has no field for the
host url.

 

[Bob Buckland ?:-\)]

Hi DiSSo,


If it's a retail edition of Office 2007 there is a 45 day money back guarantee from Microsoft (may differ outside of the U.S. for
local regulations).
http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/productrefund/refund.mspx
If it's an OEM edition you may need to discuss this with the PC/software supplier on their policies.

It's true that the team that was promoting the bibliography feature in beta and final production release appears to have just sort
of let it drift since then, perhaps relying too heavily the academic and developer community folks to be able to 'whip out some XML'
to enhance things <g> but you may want to have a look at the ongoing independent work by Yves Dhondt over at the
Microsoft hosted http://codeplex.com/bibliography site

===========
Wish I had known that before I wasted my money on purchasing office. The
bibliographic features are nice, but it's obvious that whoever designed them
has not recently been a student. There is no way to cite online achedemic
periodicals such as those from Jstor. The Web site option has no fields for
journal name, issue, and edition, and the journal option has no field for the
host url>>
--

Bob Buckland ?
MS Office System Products MVP

*Courtesy is not expensive and can pay big dividends*

 

[grammatim]

That's not all. I've been doing work for the University of Chicago
Press (both as an employee and as a freelancer) for 20 years, and what
it does with "Chicago style" is laughable and bug-filled.

For instance, there is no provision whatsoever for including Series
information in a bibliography entry, so I always put it in the
"Comments" section. Lo and behold, when I clicked _every other_ style
in the short list of styles, the series, i.e. the comment, appeared at
the end of the entry!

It is completely unaware that Chicago requires all three of: "Smith
(1995) states that"; "Smith 1995 is the most authoritative treatment
of the topic"; and "... is the usual interpretation (Smith 1995)." It
only permits the last of the three. (You can "suppress" author, title,
or date, but if you "suppress" the author inside the reference, you
have to type the name outside the parentheses and it's ordinary text.)

If you've added a page number, and "suppress" the author in hopes of
getting "Smith (1995, 36)," then the comma and space disappear and the
date runs into the page number.

If you have more than one "Source" by an author, it insists on showing
the title, so that you have to manually "suppress" the title. Yet if
there are two titles by the same author in the same year, it does not
know to make them 1995a and 1995b. You can, however, add the a and b
within the Source, meaning that if a third item is added, you have to
go back and adjust the a, b, and c in the right order (normally
alphabetically within a year).

If you have more than one "Source" by an author, sometimes it replaces
the second etc. occurrence with an em-dash (supposed to be a 3-em
dash), and sometimes it doesn't.

If your Source is a chapter in a multivolume work -- such as the
Cambridge Ancient History, or an encyclopedia -- it has no idea what
to do with the volume number asked for in the entry form, and it
treats the chapter title as a book title.

The entry forms themselves are idiotic. For a journal article, the
line for Volume Number is way down at the bottom of the "More" lines
instead of immediately before the year where it is expected.

For "Book Section," i.e. contribution to an edited volume, way at the
top is an entry called "Author of Book," which is meaningless in this
context, and way at the bottom is the entry for "Editor."

And while it does properly treat the editor of a volume as the author
when the volume itself is a bibliography listing, it places a comma
after the editor's name and a space, but not the label "ed."

***
I don't know what all the other styles in the brief list are supposed
to be, but several of them exhibit delimiters or codes within
bibliography entries, such as degree signs and double slashes.

 

[p0]

Hi DiSSo,

Just a bit to extend on Bob Buckland's reply and go a little deeper
into your question.

Each type of bibliographic entry (Web Site, Journal Artcle, ...)
actually has over 50 different fields you can use. What Microsoft did
in Word 2007 was selecting only a subset of those different fields and
present them to the user. There is a good reason for doing so: the
more limited the number of fields for a certain type is, the easier it
is to design a stylesheet for that type.

The good news is, you can make more (all) fields available for every
type. For example, you can add a URL field to a Journal Article. This
is done by adjusting the bibform.xml file which you will find in one
of the locale subdirectories of the office 12 folder. The format is
pretty straightforward XML. By looking at the type for websites, you
can probably copy/paste the fields you want to add to journal
articles.

The bad news is, if you add extra fields to a type, or even define
extra new types (perfectly possible, although I would suggest against
doing the latter), the current stylesheet will have no clue on what to
do with the extra field and just ignore it. So once you start adding
fields, you will have to expand the styles as well. And expanding the
stylesheets that come with Word 2007 isn't all that straightforward.

At http://www.codeplex.com/bibliography/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=15852
I posted a few extra styles. One of them, Harvard Leeds, implements an
electronic journal as subtype of a journal for example. There is also
an xml file and a link to a tool to extend your bibform so the
electronic journal becomes available. I admit that the documentation
at the site is rather sketchy at the moment, but if you have problems
with the usage, post a question to the discussion list, and I'll do my
best to answer it.

Yves

 

[grammatim]

Hi DiSSo,

Just a bit to extend on Bob Buckland's reply and go a little deeper
into your question.

Each type of bibliographic entry (Web Site, Journal Artcle, ...)
actually has over 50 different fields you can use. What Microsoft did
in Word 2007 was selecting only a subset of those different fields and
present them to the user. There is a good reason for doing so: the
more limited the number of fields for a certain type is, the easier it
is to design a stylesheet for that type.

The good news is, you can make more (all) fields available for every
type. For example, you can add a URL field to a Journal Article. This
is done by adjusting the bibform.xml file which you will find in one
of the locale subdirectories of the office 12 folder. The format is
pretty straightforward XML. By looking at the type for websites, you
can probably copy/paste the fields you want to add to journal
articles.

There is no such thing as "pretty straightforward XML" for someone who
has never taken a course in XML programming.

What do you have to say about the list of TEN failures of "Chicago
Style" that I listed yesterday? (And that is based on doing only a
single article with only 92 Sources, none of them particularly
problematic.)

 

[DiSSo]

Thanks for the suggestions. Luckily, I am familiar with XML so I should be
able to make the necessary adjustments.