ProCite handled unformatted citations in which the author was to be omitted with a tag, something you’d have something like “{Smith, 1999 #1 /d)”, although I don’t remember exactly what it was. EN, of course, handles it by omitting the author, e.g., "{ , 1999 #1}.
In many ways, the ProCite approach was superior, because it didn’t remove information (this author). Why does this matter? In decending order of general relevance.
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The citation was meaningful–I could tell it was by Smith. In the EN version, I can’t tell what the cite was, unless I look up what citation 1 is.
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If I’m passing around with co-authors a document with unformatted citations, it was easier to sort out errors. The EN approach invites, “Is this citation #1 from your Library or mine?”. Much easier to figure out, “Oh, Smith #1 is mine.” Shouldn’t be a problem and if things are translated into the (very cool) travelling library, it won’t matter. But, sometimes our co-authors aren’t as technologically competent as we’d like.
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Many of increasingly are using non-Word means of writing, e.g., MultiMarkdown or its relative Pandoc. In Pandoc, a cite-key will look something like [@Smith_1999_1] or, to omit the author, [-@Smith_1999_1]. I can easily code going from that to the EN format, but I can’t easily go the other way for a no-author cite, since the author information is missing from "{ , 1999 #1}.
I suppose the benefit of the EN approach is that it is very visual – no author in temporary citation, no author in final citation – but it would be nice if there were at least the option to do it in a non-destructive fashion.
Thanks for the consideration.