Word 2007 Beta 2 Citation Manager

[Zach]

I gave a test drive of a the citation manager in Beta 2 and it needs some
work. The APA style references that Word generates would not be acceptable
for most psychology professors, let alone the editors of a journal. There
are numerous errrors in how Word renders parenthetical citations and
references.

- First, when entering a source for a journal article there is no field for
journal volume or issue number. Journal volume is always reported along with
the journal title. Journal issue is listed for journals with a
non-continuous pagination scheme.

- In-text citations should be in the format of (Smith & Johnson, 2006); in
Word Beta 2 "and" is used rather than an ampersand (&).

-Additionally, APA mandates the listing of all authors (up to six) with
(Smith et al., 2006) the proxy for 6 or more authors. The current citation
manager only lists the first three authors.

-When more than two authors are cited again in the text only the first
author is indicated in the format (Smith et al., 2006); this is not the case
in Word 2007.

I find it admirable that such a feature is included into the next release of
Office, but I would like this feature to yield acceptable results for
students and researchers. Endnote is a program that handles this
functionality quite admirably and generates publication quality results.
This should be held as an example of how to generate acceptable APA style
references. Thank you for your time.

Zachary Steiner, Master's Student in Psychology

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[Bob Buckland ?:-\)]

Hi Zach,

To be sure this feedback gets directly to Microsoft be sure to also provide it through the 2007 Office System feedback tool (link
below).

=====
I gave a test drive of a the citation manager in Beta 2 and it needs some
work. The APA style references that Word generates would not be acceptable
for most psychology professors, let alone the editors of a journal. There
are numerous errrors in how Word renders parenthetical citations and
references.

- First, when entering a source for a journal article there is no field for
journal volume or issue number. Journal volume is always reported along with
the journal title. Journal issue is listed for journals with a
non-continuous pagination scheme.

- In-text citations should be in the format of (Smith & Johnson, 2006); in
Word Beta 2 "and" is used rather than an ampersand (&).

-Additionally, APA mandates the listing of all authors (up to six) with
(Smith et al., 2006) the proxy for 6 or more authors. The current citation
manager only lists the first three authors.

-When more than two authors are cited again in the text only the first
author is indicated in the format (Smith et al., 2006); this is not the case
in Word 2007.

I find it admirable that such a feature is included into the next release of
Office, but I would like this feature to yield acceptable results for
students and researchers. Endnote is a program that handles this
functionality quite admirably and generates publication quality results.
This should be held as an example of how to generate acceptable APA style
references. Thank you for your time.

Zachary Steiner, Master's Student in Psychology >>
--
I hope this helped you,

Bob Buckland ?
MS Office System Products MVP

Read about it, try it, or watch the movie
the 2007 Microsoft Office system iinfo is at
http://microsoft.com/office/preview

Already have 2007 Office System Beta 2?
Send Microsoft your feedback (with pictures)
http://sas.office.microsoft.com/

 

[Tim G.]

While you are at it, Microsoft may want to consult with academics from other
fields as well. As it stands (unless I completely missed something) the
citation manager is unusable to historians (and I imagine others in the
humanities) who use complete citation information in the footnotes rather
than the in-text parenthetical citations the Beta offers.

Any chance users will be able to tweak this on their own?

 

[Jon Lindsay]

I totally agree. If you are using Chicago Humanities style where citations
are made in full in the footnotes then only in abbreviation in subsequent
mentions, it would be great if Word was smart enough to change the style
(full or abbreviated) when you rearrange portions of the text.

As Tim mentioned, these cites can get complicated with archival or interview
cites, so the citation manager should, in addition to trying to automatically
generate the format, give the user a chance to directly edit both the full
and abreviated version. There's an option something like this in the Outlook
address book, since Addresses are as idiosyncratic as citations!

Another important feature is importing citations. Most academics have a
spreadsheet or database of citations they cut and paste into their document,
or they use EndNote or LaTex/BibTex. Word needs to be able to import this.
It should also allow me to paste in citation data in BibTex format, or the
citation output from JSTOR.

-Jon Lindsay, MIT