New Bibliographic Styles (Bob Buckland... or anyone)

[John P]

(I'll direct this to Bob, as he posted elsewhere on the topic, but I'm open
to replies from anyone, of course.)

Hi, Bob. I have found so many helpful posts by you regarding Word 2007. I
have a question regarding what you posted here:
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/software/aspnet/31932870/citation-format-for-word.aspx.
To refresh your memory, it was on the topic of Word's Referencing feature.
The issue was that there are two different "Chicago styles." One is the
author-date system, used in the sciences and social sciences, and the other
was the so-called humanities style. I think Chicago calls these Two and One,
respectively. What Word calls 'Chicago' is, in fact, only the author-date
version of Chicago, leaving those in humanities without an option. (Note that
the same issue arises for Turabian: the default style in Word is the
'alternate' author-date version of Turabian, and not the standard humanities
version of Turabian.)

I have searched high and low on the Internet for a 'humanities-type' style
but have had no luck. I can't even find something remotely close to it. Do
you know if anyone has created something like this, either MS or an end-user?
It just seems like such a widespread need, I can't believe there's no
solution out there.

Thanks for any help,
John

John Perry, Ph.D.
Dept of Theology
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN

 

[p0]

(I'll direct this to Bob, as he posted elsewhere on the topic, but I'm open
to replies from anyone, of course.)

Hi, Bob. I have found so many helpful posts by you regarding Word 2007. I
have a question regarding what you posted here:http://www.eggheadcafe.com/software/aspnet/31932870/citation-format-f....
To refresh your memory, it was on the topic of Word's Referencing feature.
The issue was that there are two different "Chicago styles." One is the
author-date system, used in the sciences and social sciences, and the other
was the so-called humanities style. I think Chicago calls these Two and One,
respectively. What Word calls 'Chicago' is, in fact, only the author-date
version of Chicago, leaving those in humanities without an option. (Note that
the same issue arises for Turabian: the default style in Word is the
'alternate' author-date version of Turabian, and not the standard humanities
version of Turabian.)

I have searched high and low on the Internet for a 'humanities-type' style
but have had no luck. I can't even find something remotely close to it. Do
you know if anyone has created something like this, either MS or an end-user?
It just seems like such a widespread need, I can't believe there's no
solution out there.

Thanks for any help,
John

John Perry, Ph.D.
Dept of Theology
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN

Hello,

Microsoft did not deliver any extra bibliography styles than the ones
that came with Word 2007. And honestly, with all the criticism they
got on the current set of styles, I wouldn't be surprised if they
never released any new ones anymore.

I just googled CMS and I noticed that you have to pay to get the
specification/style guide. How do they expect that to work? They bribe
academics to force their students to buy a copy of the book? I
actually never understood the science of style guides anyway.
Shouldn't content be more important than form? I can so see someone
writing an article containing a simple solution for global warming and
it being rejected because there was no period at the end of their
references ... The fact that humanity could be doomed because someone
forgot a period really scares me. A style guide should be provided for
free (at least in an electronic version) and the creators should be
happy if people actually wanted to use it.

Doing some further searching for 'free' information, I noticed that
the style you describe seems to be a footnote style for the most part.
There are very few of those out there. Personally, I'm only aware of
one, and that's one I wrote last weekend. I have no idea if it is
close to what you are looking for.

The good news is the bibliography styles are completely open so you
are not "without an option". You can write the style yourself if you
really want it. And since footnote citation styles most likely don't
require the use of year suffices in case an author has multiple works
published in the same year, you should be able to achieve most of the
requirements made by the style. A few exotic things won't be possible
though.

As I see it you have three options:
1)Write the style yourself. I'm maintaining a small project on
codeplex (http://www.codeplex.com/bibliography) where you can find
some guidelines on developing a citation style as well as an example
of a footnote style: http://www.codeplex.com/bibliography/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=19998.
If you think even that's too hard, you might want to start from
scratch using the information at
http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft_office_word/archive/2007/12/14/bibliography-citations-1011.aspx

2)Send a mail to the CMS people and ask them to implement the style
for you. I would think that next to just cashing in on their style,
they could actually deliver something. Although that might be asking a
lot. But you never know.

3)Wait till someone writes the style for you. That could take a while
and might actually never happen. If I find the time and get my hands
on a free copy of the style guide, I might give it a shot in the
future.

Yves

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

See http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html for a
summary.

 

[John P]

Hi, Yves. Thanks for your helpful reply. I loaded the MHRA style you created
and--good news--it is not that far off from Chicago. In fact, in my very
brief examination, the only differences I have noticed may in fact be minor
bugs in your implementation (or user-error on my part). For example, I
entered a citation which appeared as follows (italics lost in pasting, but
they're correct in Word):

Bruce Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, corrected
edn (New York: UBS, 1975) (p. 430)

The parentheses around the page number are not supposed to be there (either
according to MHRA or CMS). So it may be a bug in your style, or maybe I just
did something wrong... but I can't get rid of the parentheses. (There are
exceptions under which the parentheses are required, but they don't apply in
this case. I could explain if you want.)

There are a few other quirks like that, but I think that--perhaps without
knowing it--you have already written a CMS style! With a few fixes, I think
you might just become the hero of much of the scholarly academy!

John

 

[grammatim]

Hello,

Microsoft did not deliver any extra bibliography styles than the ones
that came with Word 2007. And honestly, with all the criticism they
got on the current set of styles, I wouldn't be surprised if they
never released any new ones anymore.

I just googled CMS and I noticed that you have to pay to get the
specification/style guide. How do they expect that to work? They bribe
academics to force their students to buy a copy of the book? I
actually never understood the science of style guides anyway.
Shouldn't content be more important than form? I can so see someone
writing an article containing a simple solution for global warming and
it being rejected because there was no period at the end of their
references ... The fact that humanity could be doomed because someone
forgot a period really scares me. A style guide should be provided for
free (at least in an electronic version) and the creators should be
happy if people actually wanted to use it.

If you're so clueless about the nature and purpose of scholarly
referencing, and the nature of scholarly publishing, why did you have
the gall to appoint yourself the newsgroup god of the Word2007
bibliography "tool"? (who, incidentally, thinks that XML programming
is easy.)

It begins to be clear why you are never able to answer people's
questions, and why your most frequent answer is "Maybe there was an
installation error."

FYI, mss. are not rejected because their references do not conform to
house style. After a ms. has been accepted, the author is likely to be
asked to format the references into the house style, or the publisher
has copyeditors on staff who do that.

 

[John P]

Hello again, Yves. Please just ignore the comment below from that yahoo. We
appreciate your hard work. I actually have a couple specific questions about
BibWord. Perhaps you'd be willing to discuss it over email? If so, please
drop contact me at (e-mail address removed).

More generally, is BibWord supposed to be some sort of GUI or WYSIWYG
interface for creating styles? Or do you still need to use 'code' in order to
make/edit them?

 

[p0]

Hello again, Yves. Please just ignore the comment below from that yahoo. We
appreciate your hard work. I actually have a couple specific questions about
BibWord. Perhaps you'd be willing to discuss it over email? If so, please
drop contact me at (e-mail address removed).

More generally, is BibWord supposed to be some sort of GUI or WYSIWYG
interface for creating styles? Or do you still need to use 'code' in order to
make/edit them?

It is still 'code'. The idea is to one day make it into a GUI but that
would take me more time than it is worth to me right now. All
formatting data is concentrated in the start of the document though.
That at least makes it easier to find where what happens. And for me
(but I'm biased) a lot easier to manipulate it then to have to search
around all through the stylesheet.

To answer the other question about the pages between brackets or not.
If you enter the pages directly into the source, they will not be
between brackets, if you enter the pages by right clicking an in-text
citation (footnote in this case) and then selecting "Edit Citation"
they will be between brackets. An example of a possible output (from
the style guide at http://www.mhra.org.uk/Publications/Books/StyleGuide/index.html)
where both are used is:

Carlos Fuentes, Aura, ed. by Peter Standish, Durham Modern Language
Series: Hispanic Texts, i (Durham: University of Durham, 1986), pp. 12–
16 (p. 14).

So the pages between brackets are actually a subselection of the page
range given before. At least that was what I tried to mimic in the
style. It might be a good idea to add that as a note to the download
page as I can see where it can cause confusion. The style is by no
means perfect. It is a best-effort based on the rules and examples of
the freely available pdf of the style guide. Keep in mind that most of
these styles I never use. If you find errors in them or can add new
types, please let me know. It is better for everyone if things get
corrected.

There seems to be several differences between MHRA and CMS though: the
number of authors displayed, special provisions for editors,
translators, ... I would be happy to help you with creating one for
CMS but I agree that it would be better to take this discussion
offline (my email is valid) or to the project pages.

Yves

 

[grammatim]

Hello again, Yves. Please just ignore the comment below from that yahoo. We
appreciate your hard work. I actually have a couple specific questions about
BibWord. Perhaps you'd be willing to discuss it over email? If so, please
drop contact me at (e-mail address removed).

More generally, is BibWord supposed to be some sort of GUI or WYSIWYG
interface for creating styles? Or do you still need to use 'code' in order to
make/edit them?

I'm sorry, but you would do far, far better to purchase one of the
stand-alone bibliography tools (there are even several designed
specifically for biblical scholars) than trying to use Word2007's
bibliography "tool." In a thread some months ago, I listed no less
than ten ways in which Word's "Chicago" style deviates from Chicago
style (and I worked directly or freelance for the University of
Chicago Press for twenty years).

Yves simply does not understand how scholarly referencing works, and
his admission today that he has never seen the Chicago Manual of Style
(the American standard for humanities publishing, at least) shows that
he takes no interest in the field for which he enjoys telling people
that all they have to do is write some XML code -- and that if they
change something in the 3500th line of code that they can access by
this or that method, the solution they need may emerge.

I take it you're not my friend John Perry, the professor of Persian at
the University of Chicago.

 

[John P]

No, I don't teach Persian: though it sounds interesting! I have EndNote and
have used it for years, and have also tried RefWorks. But I'm not a big fan
of either. Plus, EndNote would be quite expensive for me to upgrade for Vista.

As to whether Word's CMS style conforms to the manual or not, I don't really
know because Word is only attempting to do the author-date version rather
than the humanities-footnote version. It's the latter that I need. Whether
Word's CMS-author-date style violates CMS's author-date rules is just beside
the point, because I want the CMS humanities style.

I do wonder whether you're being unfair to Yves, however. He had never heard
of me before yesterday and yet over the past 24 hours has already spent quite
a big of time emailing me and even editing the style codes for me. That's
pretty generous on his part.

 

[grammatim]

No, I don't teach Persian: though it sounds interesting! I have EndNote and
have used it for years, and have also tried RefWorks. But I'm not a big fan
of either. Plus, EndNote would be quite expensive for me to upgrade for Vista.

As to whether Word's CMS style conforms to the manual or not, I don't really
know because Word is only attempting to do the author-date version rather
than the humanities-footnote version. It's the latter that I need. Whether
Word's CMS-author-date style violates CMS's author-date rules is just beside
the point, because I want the CMS humanities style.

I do wonder whether you're being unfair to Yves, however. He had never heard
of me before yesterday and yet over the past 24 hours has already spent quite
a big of time emailing me and even editing the style codes for me. That's
pretty generous on his part.

Indeed, I only know him from his contributions to this newsgroup.

I thought of buying EndNote before it turned out I would have to
upgrade to Vista and 2007 because XP and 2003 have never been updated
to handle improvements in Unicode, and since it comes with the
bibliography tool, I didn't let the Endnote website get me down: turns
out it isn't nearly as good or flexible as a magnificent Mac program
called Papyrus -- whose developer chose not to rewrite the whole thing
for OS X, so he just put the old version out for free for anyone who
wanted to stay with OS 9.

In fact, it seems that the :"Chicago" implementation is the only
really awful one (of the three I know): both APA and MLA bibliography
entries come out right, not omitting information and not putting it in
peculiar places. (But why they chose not to include footnote formats
is a mystery.)

A while ago (before 2007 had a big user base), there was a thread on
this sort of thing, and one of the recommendations was Scholar's Aid.
I went so far as to download the trial version (v. 4AE) and print out
the manual (using the Adobe Reader Booklet Printing feature so as not
to waste paper), but the url doesn't seem to be anywhere in that
manual; however, the latest copyright is 2002, meaning that a year ago
it hadn't been adapted to Word2003 yet. It's biblically oriented, I
think it's at shareware price, and it may be what you need. And it
makes footnotes but, as far as I can see, not in-text references.

 

[John P]

Thanks for the tips. I'll go check out Scholar's Aid right now!