Sort Order in Bibliography

CrazyGecko, I think you’re very clear. If anything, it’s probably me not responding as clearly.

Yes, I understand the custom 8 field entry is a manual thing and so needs to be done at the end of the writing project.

But I see no reason not to use the year you want the sort to be performed on rather than a number specific to the sort order in the manuscript in current production?  Then only  newly added refs by that author need the adjustment? 

@teabowl1 wrote:

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.

Unfortunately, “splitting” the original publication date into the Custom 8 field will return us to the original problem which you described on p. 1 of this thread-- not being able to omit the appearance of the original publication date from an in-text citation. As you noted there:

But I discovered a new problem! Sometimes in my citation, I need to exclude the “Year”. So, a citation that looks like

(Mill [1836] 1969)

without the year should look like

(Mill)

However, because EndNote only knows how to exclude the actual “Year” field, what ends up happening is I get this when I exclude “Year”:

(Mill [1836])

Editing an in-text citation to omit “Year” is permissible (hence keeping both the original publication date with the re-publication date as a complete unit in the Year field). But parsing the original publication date into the custom field means there’s no way to prevent this info from being displayed in an in-text citation since it’s “outside” of the Year field.

@leanne wrote:

But I see no reason not to use the year you want the sort to be performed on rather than a number specific to the sort order in the manuscript in current production?  Then only  newly added refs by that author need the adjustment? 

Unfortunately the problem is that the original publication date is encased in brackets which EndNote ignores sorting in favor of the non-bracketed re-publication year.  To illustrate the Year field information format is: [1887] 2009.

The manual “workaround” sort order is meant to force EndNote to include the bracketed original publication year along with references having only a single, non-bracketed publication year.

teabowl1 could adjust the sort order for just the “newly added refs by that author need[ing] the adjustment” if it’s a preferred working style. Personally I think it would be easier perform the adjustments at the end of the writing process when both the document and use of references have been finalized.

Oh, what I meant was this:

In the “Year” field, but both years, e.g.,

[1894] 1997

And in the “Custom 8” field, put only the original date, e.g.:

1894

For those entries that only have one year, the “Custom 8” field should be a repeat of what was put in the “Year” field. That does mean that for all new entries, regardless of if there is one or two years, all entries will have to have something in the “Year” field and the “Custom 8” field. That’s the downside to that solution. The upside is that this system will not break the sort order when an additional work is added to the EndNote bibliography.

@teabowl1 wrote:

Oh, what I meant was this:

 

In the “Year” field, but both years, e.g.,

[1894] 1997

 

And in the “Custom 8” field, put only the original date, e.g.:

1894

 

Thanks for the clarification.  Nice solution - this will definitely work!  Since the sort order is Author + Custom 8 + Year, placing the original publication year in the Custom 8 field facilitates the numerical sort without having to manually define the sort order.

Best,

CG