citation / reference manager - Suggestion

[William]

I love the idea of having the citation ability within Word/Office; however it
is truly in its infancy. Others have posted comments I agree with concerning
Office's weakness. I want to add to them and suggest that Office NEEDS to
have a citation download/grab function. Very few researchers (at least in my
field) have to type in reference information these days (e.g., with endnote
download from webpage). It is very time consuming and one of the top reasons
I do not use the Office version yet. The other reason I want to reinforce, as
others have specified somewhat, is that Office does not allow the changing of
citation style. APA is not APA-5th style, and even in APA-5th there is
variability the researcher can choose (e.g., within paragraph referencing
only use date once, A's and B's for multiple authors same year, first names,
etc). The point being I need the ability to change style. Finally, I want to
be able to import one data base (my endnote database) into my Office database.

I look forward to the next generation of reference manager in office, hoping
these deciding factors are in place.

Also, there are plenty of things that other ref managers do not have yet to
be investigated - please Office, be open to innovation.

----------------
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http://www.microsoft.com/office/com...b070f4&dg=microsoft.public.word.docmanagement

 

[Bob Buckland ?:-\)]

Hi William,

The Bibliography feature will hopefully see some improvements. The newer version of it in MS Office:mac 2008 is pretty much the
same. It's not clear if that's because the program management team that built it has moved to other jobs <g> or if it was still
'version 12' of Office, albeit the mac version (Word 2007 is v12 on Windows).

There is actually a capability to pull references from websites (it's part of Insert Citation=>Search Libraries). It was basically
setup as an (optional installation feature) SmartTag function that apparently the folks who own the information on sites would need
to implement, rather than having a generic capability to 'screen scrape' data and then use it in Word. My understanding is that
it's meant to work something like this SmartTag demo for pulling data into Excel from the Research (libraries) pane
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HA010929701033.aspx


So far I haven't found a library site that implemented it (although librarians have asked MS for help in doing so), or an easy
method to have the SmartTag Plugin for Bibliiographic Information that ships with Office 2007 to 'go live' in Word 2007 itself, or
be listed in the SmartTags tab
(Alt, T, A).

Part of the idea seems to have been that since university level talent would be interested in this feature and that same base has
the ability/skills to customize the XML that folks or schools would create or share additional Bibliography styles (.xsl files) and
that libraries would offer their reference libraries for folks to use.

MS Research has a preview of an Article Authoring Add-In
http://microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=09C55527-0759-4D6D-AE02-51E90131997E
that is explained in the blog entries here,
http://blogs.msdn.com/exscientia/archive/tags/NLM/default.aspx
that does include some of the abilities you mentioned, as far as integrating sources. The authors have requested feedback on the
add-in, so please do try it

An obvious, but so far missing piece of the puzzle would be to tie in Word's 2007 Library search feature to Microsoft's Live
Academic Search but as you can see by the date here things seem to not always come to fruition
http://savas.parastatidis.name/2007/01/25/595c0ffb-6595-41bb-9f81-9525f173b55c.aspx (Savas is one of the Architect's for Technical
Computing for Microsoft)

It is possible to use VBA in Word (but I have only seen one implementation of it) as described here, to be able to pull in sources
from an outside source:

I haven't seen a tool for importing an Endnote database, but there is one for BibUtil, so it may be out there

It's not clear if Microsoft really intends to make the Citation tool in Word one to rival full time 3rd party products as to
features. We'll see Unfortunately MS does seem to have a habit in Office of tossing in a 1st generation feature, then letting
it sort of just 'sit', rather than improve it or solicit feedback on it, and then may use their own collected data to trigger its
demise/deprecation based on the feature 'not being used' <g>.

As to 'meeting' the guidelines of varying interpretations of the Reference styles, I don't recall seeing documentation from
Microsoft on what they used as the source documentation for the styles that are included and to what extent they created or 'farmed
out'/collaborated with Reference field sources to produce the result in Word 2007.

================
I love the idea of having the citation ability within Word/Office; however it
is truly in its infancy. Others have posted comments I agree with concerning
Office's weakness. I want to add to them and suggest that Office NEEDS to
have a citation download/grab function. Very few researchers (at least in my
field) have to type in reference information these days (e.g., with endnote
download from webpage). It is very time consuming and one of the top reasons
I do not use the Office version yet. The other reason I want to reinforce, as
others have specified somewhat, is that Office does not allow the changing of
citation style. APA is not APA-5th style, and even in APA-5th there is
variability the researcher can choose (e.g., within paragraph referencing
only use date once, A's and B's for multiple authors same year, first names,
etc). The point being I need the ability to change style. Finally, I want to
be able to import one data base (my endnote database) into my Office database.

I look forward to the next generation of reference manager in office, hoping
these deciding factors are in place.

Also, there are plenty of things that other ref managers do not have yet to
be investigated - please Office, be open to innovation. >>
--

Bob Buckland ?
MS Office System Products MVP

*Courtesy is not expensive and can pay big dividends*