I have a sort order problem in my bibliography. Some dates in my citations list two dates, the original publication date and the publication date of the issue I actually used. In the “Year” field, these are entered in the following manner:
[1887] 1954
[1921] 2006
The problem is that when sorting, EndNote does not recognise that [1921] actually should come before 1997, because the square bracket throws off its sorting abilities.
So, I get something like this which is incorrect :
Wellington, James
1900 Sample Bibliography. Christchurch: Random Publisher
———
[1887] 1954 Another Book. London: Acme Publisher
———
[1921] 2006 My Latest Book. London: Beta Publisher
When it should be sorted like this:
Wellington, James
[1887] 1954 Another Book. London: Acme Publisher
———
1900 Sample Bibliography. Christchurch: Random Publisher
———
[1921] 2006 My Latest Book. London: Beta Publisher
Similar to your other query, also suggest creating a custom field to contain the original publication date. Parsing the original publication date from the publication date will enable setting up a bibliography sort order by: Author + Original Publication Date + Publication Date. If a reference does not have an original publication date, the sort will then default to the original publication date.
Once the custom field is set up for the reference type then modify the output style’s template to include the custom field enclosed within brackets.
Thanks for checking on this. Will mull this over but It looks like the two dates cannot be parsed and automated. Both dates need to be maintained in the Year field - which won’t permit sorting on the original publication date so that will need to be done manually.
I don’t mind manually sorting the Bibliography after it has been formatted. I don’t have a lot of works that have two dates, so manual sorting won’t be a problem. But the problem is, will my manual sorting be erased when the Bibliography updates again, say due to inserting a additional citation or whatnot in the document?
I don’t like the idea of having a “final version” of the document without the EndNote hidden field codes because that will mean having two versions of the document and every time I change the verision with the EndNote hidden codes, I have to create a new version and manually resort bibliography. That’s too many variables to keep track of, and too many variables means error is going to be introduced somewhere.
Yes, manual sorting of the bibliography will be erased when subsequent bibliographic updates occur. So the way around this issue is the notion of converting the final bibliography to a text file which enables manipulating the references and having them “stay put” once the manipulation is done.
As noted in my prior posting to your other query about removing a comma from a bibliographic reference, you can convert a copy of the original document to a text file after you’ve finalized the document. This will remove the EndNote codes and allow manually sorting the references. The rationale for doing this at the end of the writing process and not during is to minimize potential errors of using the wrong version of the document.
First, make a bake a backup copy of your document before the conversion because once the EndNote field codes are removed, they’re gone for good and the only way to restore them is to manually insert each one back into the document. So keeping a master copy of the document with the original field codes preserves the ability to later return and modify the document if needed.
CrazyGecko, thanks for thinking this through with/for me. Very much appreciated.
The one reason I don’t really like the suggestion, though it may be the only feasible one, is because of this:
even after a document is finalized there might come a time when I’d want to fiddle around with it again later. This could happen say hours, days, or weeks later. The “final version” with the EndNote codes intact isn’t actually the “final” version since there’s still the issue of manual sorting and punctuation removals to occur. But these kinds of edits (and others) aren’t ones I’ll necessarily remember I need to do when I return to the “final version” (with EndNote codes) and make a text-only/no-EndNote-code version. This kind of thing to remember is likely to be lost days or weeks after the “final version” is made. This is why I don’t really like that solution, though for now it might be the only feasible one.
The one reason I don’t really like the suggestion, though it may be the only feasible one, is …This is why I don’t really like that solution, though for now it might be the only feasible one.
Okay, you can ignore this long ramble, and I don’t think it contains any solutions that work!
Coming to the discussion late, but what if you still put the original date in a differnent field, in the style you surround by the square brackets and in the sort, sort by that first and by the real year field second. If the field is empty, does it ignore it or sort it as first, because it is empty?
Nevermind, I see that is where you started!.. Hiding the year is the problem then. - but I would just avoid that sentence construction then!
So what if you have a dummy field that always has the year you want to be sorted by, and put the wholde year thing in the year field and always sort by the dummy field. - the major pain is having to manually fill that field I guess.
Depending on how many of these you have, if there are only a few, have the year you want to sort on in the year field, and when you need the double version add it as a suffix and hide the original year - leaving just the suffix? You should also could have the double field in a custom field an always have it appear by editing the citation, but that wouldn’t address your “hide year” needs.
hmmm then you need a way to get what you need for those in the bibliography. - for that you would need another custom field to combine with the year and the correct punctuation, and I can’t come up with a solution there quite yet!
As you can tell, this is a difficult problem and by adding too many custom fields, some of which appear or disappear or what not, we’re adding way too many variables to keep track of, something that a software program should be doing and not a human being. All those custom fields etc. are prone to human error.
I’m surprised that this isn’t an issue that EndNote has solved early on. I mean, we are in like the 15th+ years of EndNote’s existence! It is not all that uncommon to have to indicate two years for a work, particularly when famous authors like Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Karl Max, etc. are being cited. We may not use the original published book in our work but we will be using the original translated text. In those cases, we need to cite BOTH the original publication date and the publication date of the book we are using.
Having used EndNote since when it was called EndNote 5 (way back in early 2000) seems to me there’s still a lot of old, OLD code in existence in EndNote X5, so we’re stuck with some of these problems.
I guess the short answer is, that no one has raised it to my knowledge before? Certainly it isn’t a common occurance in the sciences which is where I come from. It took quite a long time for them to come up with the Author (Year) solution which many did ask for… and as you noted it doesn’t always work, when you try to use it in a slightly different way.
I know that backward compatibility is a big issue with Endnote users, so rewriting the whole program would mean that compatibility would become a MAJOR problem, hence their difficulty in working with the legacy coding. The last time they tried to do a major switch (EN8) you may recall the buggy result and the inability to switch back and forth between EN7 and EN8/9/X users.
Finally as they provide more complicated various options to comply with requests, the steeper learning curve for new users! It is only us “old folks” who learned the program thru the various reincarnations (I used it from Endnote, prior to Endnote Plus when it was a Niles product) who actually KNOW all the possibilites and reasons for gliches…
Ah yes! I was trying to remember who was the original developer for EndNote. It is Niles Software, as you stated.
Have you ever thought of switching away from EndNote? Over the decade as I come to this forum (under different user names) I remember seeing you around, so perhaps you will be sticking with EndNote. I’m hoping that after this major project I’ll switch OUT of EndNote and use something like Sente or some other citation software. EndNote has so many awful quirks in its interaction with Microsoft Word. For example, do you know that in the footnote portion of a Word document we cannot deviate away from the default author-date format defined in the bibliography style? So, if I wanted to write a foot note like:
1 In Miyoshi’s (2002) study of Nepalese Buddhists…
We can’t do it because the default author-date format for footnote is: Author Year (e.g., Miyoshi 2002). The Prefix and Suffix fields have no effect on a citation in the footnote! We also cannot use the EndNote command to hide author or hide date. They don’t work in the Microsoft Word footnote. So, in order to make a citation in the footnote that looks like the example above, I have to first insert the citation, then format it as hidden text, and then manually type in how the citation should look like. I insert the citation in order to keep it “live” in the bibliography, but I also format it as hidden text in order that the wrong style doesn’t show up.
Tell me, isn’t that crazy? We’re up to EndNote X5 by now! X5 = 15
Have you checked? I think that footnotes now have edit citation options. The Author (Year) option is there in the APA footnote citation I just checked?
So you insert your footnote citation and you add what ever text you want around the “citation” just like you would in a citation in the text? No need for suffix/prefix stuff anyway?
After tinkering around, here’s a workaround solution which addresses the issues of: 1) omitting both the original publication and re-publication year for an in-text citation; and 2) generating a bibliography which addresses sorting by the original publication year. The underlying idea still includes a customized field but this time the field will be used to predefine a specific sort order for multiple references from the same author. (Refer to image 3 for the resulting bibliography.)
PROCEDURE:
Modify the reference type template to include a customized field (see image 1). This example uses the “Book” reference template and the “Custom 8” field which has been named “Sort Order”.
Modify the output style’s bibliography sort order to reflect the following fields: Author + Custom 8 + Year (see image 1).
Assign sort number to “Sort Order” field. Now in the library, identify muliple references from the same author and determine their proper sort order (see image 2). For example, Wellington’s book with the original publication year [1885] is the oldest so would appear first on the bibliography list. So enter “1” in the Sort Order field (see image 2). His [1887] book will be assigned “2” which will cause it to be listed second. Continue assigning numbers (which ascend to correspond with the desired bibliography sort order. (Additional multiple and single references were added to test the layout.)
Authors with a single reference do not need to be assigned a sort number. Also note that the original publication year and re-publication year are retained as a complete unit in the Year field so the entire sequence will be omitted when you wish to hide the Year info in an in-text citation.
Generate in-text citations and bibliography. The resulting MS Word bibliography result is shown in image 3. (There might be some punctuation differences as I modified an APA 6th output style but you can adapt according to your needs.)
*This procedure is a bit time-consuming when assigning the sorting sequence numbers so you’ll need to determine if the time and effort is worth the end-result.
Have you checked? I think that footnotes now have edit citation options. The Author (Year) option is there in the APA footnote citation I just checked?
So you insert your footnote citation and you add what ever text you want around the “citation” just like you would in a citation in the text? No need for suffix/prefix stuff anyway?
----------------------------------------------
I played around with it more and this is what I discovered. If the citation style template’s footnote style is marked as “Using footnote format”, then the options to exclude author, year, or both do not work even though the commands are available. However, if the footnote style is marked as “Same as citations”, then the command options do work!
Wow! This is a new one for me because last time I was on the forum, when I was using EndNote X4, I think a Thomson Reuters official said that there was no way to use those command options in the footnotes and I simply had to type them manually and then insert the citation in the footnote but format them as hidden text in order to keep it “live” in the bibliography but not show up in the wrong format in the footnote!
Again, the trick is to make sure that “Same as citation” is selected (see attached image).
Hey CrazyGecko, thanks for thinking this through for me. I have read through the solution and it possibly may work! I don’t yet have time to actually perform and test this solution because I’m doing revisions and edits to my dissertation so don’t have the time. But when I do get around to trying out this solution, I’ll let you know how this works out!
Edit:
And if I can sum up what I think you’re doing:
I think basically the idea is to use a “Custom” field to type in the original publication date, but this field is ONLY used for sorting purposes and never displayed in the actual citation or bibliography. The “Year” field will still contain both the original publication year, and the re-publication year.
I think basically the idea is to use a “Custom” field to type in the original publication date, but this field is ONLY used for sorting purposes and never displayed in the actual citation or bibliography. The “Year” field will still contain both the original publication year, and the re-publication year.
teabowl1,
Just to clarify, the “Custom” field is used to assign a number corresponding to the desired bibliography listing for multiple references from the same author. So the reference order in the bibliography is sorted in order by: 1) the “Custom” field [original publication date (when the reference has such a date)], then 2) when the reference does not have an original publication year [a single 4-digit number].
Thanks again for the possible solution. It does work but it is also, unfortunately, problematic. If I have to put in “Custom 8” the order in which I want the work cited to appear in, this order can be messed up when at a later date I add another book or article by the same author! This means that when I add the new entry, I will have to go through the entire list of works by the author and determine, again, what order that particular book needs to be in. And, if his/her book is in the middle of a sort, then every work after that will have to have a changed number. Well, perhaps on could use decimal points. So while this workaround does work for the immediate bibliography, it potentially breaks when a new work is added.
Hmm…but what if instead of just a sort number in “Custom 8” I put the actual original publication date? That might work…and of course for some works that means having to enter the same year twice.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear previously but assigning the sort order (Custom 8) is a manual adjustment which does not automatically update when another reference by the same author has been added. Because the sort order for “Custom 8” has to be performed manually, this step should be performed only at the end of the writing process when both the document and references have been finalized.
