Bibliography pane

[kjmatthews]

I find some of the ways the Bibliography pane works with certain Bookends features to be a little strange. Specifically, Mellel lists citations prefaced with some conditional markers or with user input as different from the same citations without the extra data. For example, the citations:

{Matthews citation data@page#} and {%Matthews citation data@page#}

result in a bibliography panel that lists

-Matthews citation data
Matthews citation data

even though these two citations are clearly for the same item.

In my opinion this duplication provides nothing useful, and clutters the bibliography panel. This is particularly so in the case of conditional markers, whose function is to indicate the behavior of a citation, rather than its content. What advantage is there to listing the same citation twice (or more)? Why shouldn't Mellel ignore the information surrounding the essential citation data? It already does this already with the conditional operators ! and * (it checks the corresponding options in the Edit Citation window), and it should be pretty easy to separate the remaining inessential data from essential data: anything between backslashes gets ignored (wherever it appears); anything after an @ gets ignored; ignore hyphens, underscores, percentage signs and dollar signs when they are the first character(s) to appear in a citation.

Thoughts?

[ppnkg]

You're probably right - this is an unnecessary duplication.

Speaking of citation behaviour - I wonder if we could have an 'Author (date)' option? (hope I'm not missing something here...)

[kjmatthews]

You're probably right - this is an unnecessary duplication.

Speaking of citation behaviour - I wonder if we could have an 'Author (date)' option? (hope I'm not missing something here...)

This would be the domain of Bookends, though, not Mellel.

[SimoneUe]

This would be the domain of Bookends, though, not Mellel.

Not quite, if I understand ppnkg correctly: He would like to have "Author (year)" in the pane, without any additional information such as pagenumber etc. This would lead to fewer quotes in the pane and thereby make it more usefull. I hardly ever quote the same auther from the same page twice, but I do quote the same author time and time again which leads to an endless number of quotes of one author in the pane and actually makes it useless. I think that is what ppnkg meant.

[kjmatthews]

This would be the domain of Bookends, though, not Mellel.

Not quite, if I understand ppnkg correctly: He would like to have "Author (year)" in the pane, without any additional information such as pagenumber etc. This would lead to fewer quotes in the pane and thereby make it more usefull. I hardly ever quote the same auther from the same page twice, but I do quote the same author time and time again which leads to an endless number of quotes of one author in the pane and actually makes it useless. I think that is what ppnkg meant.

Oh, I see. My misunderstanding. Can't you use the Bookends "@" syntax to cite page numbers? I think this would clear up your problem.

[laup]

Unless I'm doing something wrong, the page number generated by @ in Bookends does not show up in the Bibliography pane. I agree with the earlier commenters that this would be very convenient. The other suggestion I have on this is to show enough authors in the Author and date so as to disambiguate among multi-author (more than two) documents in the same year. Even if a given item had to spill over into the next line that would be preferable.

[harryhoffner]

Because of the double listing of the same works if one has "-" prefixed, and because the abbreviated listing is too ambiguous, and because that palette pane is too small to show enough items, I never use the bibliography palette. It is much easier just to invoke Bookends, search its database, and drag the reference from its found pane into the Mellel document.