Bibliographic References
- Jenny Seifert (Unlicensed)
eXtyles greatly reduces the time an editor must spend editing reference lists and bibliographies and helps ensure that your references are set up according to your organization’s preferred style. The Bibliographic References processing function automatically identifies a reference entry’s type (journal, book, etc.) and restructures certain reference types based on your organization’s publication style.
The Bibliographic Reference processing function can restructure most journal and book references that have no significant errors with near-perfect accuracy. References that are not restructured are visually identified for manual editing.
Only paragraphs that were styled during the Cleanup process or by hand as References are restructured during this step.
The CADTH configuration of eXtyles has two Bibliographic Reference processing options: Bibliographic Reference Editing and Tagging and Bibliographic Reference Tagging Only. The two processes will produce different results and so they should be used deliberately. The following sections describe each process’s behavior.
Bibliographic Reference Editing and Tagging
After Bibliographic Reference Editing and Tagging, each component of the reference is identified and color-coded for easy proofing. A typical journal reference looks like this:
The first item in this example is the reference type tag <jrn>, which specifies the type of reference that eXtyles has identified. Possible reference types are:
<jrn> Journal references
<bok> Book references
<edb> Edited book or book chapter references
<conf> Conference proceeding
<eref> Reference to a website
<lgl> Citation of a legal case or statute
<ths> Reference to a thesis/dissertation
<other> References to working papers, patents, maps, and other documents
<unknown> Unsupported or otherwise unknown reference type
Reference types might occasionally be incorrectly identified as <bok> or <unknown>. Misidentification is usually the result of a punctuation error by the author or a pattern that eXtyles does not support.
The grey shading of the <jrn> tag in this example is achieved by configuring Word to shade fields. We recommend that you set Word to shade fields so that it is immediately visually clear whether content is plain text or a field. To adjust this setting in Word, go to File > Options > Advanced, and in the "Show document content" section, set "Field shading" to Always.
Each element in a reference entry is identified and tagged appropriately with a character style by eXtyles during Bibliographic References processing. The following table lists common reference components and their element (character style) names:
Element | Example Text |
|---|---|
bib_surname | Dias / Sutton / Ades / Welton |
bib_fname | S / AJ / AE / NJ |
bib_year | 2013 |
bib_article | Evidence synthesis for decision making 2: a generalized linear modeling framework for pairwise and network meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials |
bib_journal | Med Decis Making |
bib_volume | 33 |
bib_issue | 5 |
bib_fpage | 607 |
bib_lpage | 617 |
Character Styling of References
When references are processed by eXtyles, Word character styles such as bib_article, bib_ journal, and so on are automatically applied to each part of the reference text. If you manually edit a reference after reference processing, be sure that the character styles are correctly applied to the edited text. These character styles can be applied just like any other character styles in Word, that is, via Word’s Styles feature (in Word 2010, access this menu via Home > Styles or press Control + Alt + Shift + S).
In some unusual cases, even when a reference is correctly copyedited, eXtyles may fail to process it correctly. In such cases, you should edit the reference by hand and then apply the character styles directly from the Word Style feature.
The character styles should be applied only to the actual content that is typically highlighted, not to surrounding punctuation. For example, if your organization’s style includes parentheses around the year of publication, apply the bib_year character style to just the year itself, and not to the surrounding punctuation.
Styles that may be used for reference entries include the following:
Style | Use |
|---|---|
bib_number | The reference number |
bib_etal | “et al.” or "and others" when it appears in the reference |
bib_surname | An author’s surname |
bib_fname | An author’s given name or initials |
bib_suffix | An author’s suffix (e.g., Jr., Sr.) |
bib_organization | An organization name as an author |
bib_book | The title of a book |
bib_series | The series title in a reference |
bib_article | The article title |
bib_ journal | The journal name |
bib_year | The year of publication |
bib_volume | The volume of publication |
bib_issue | The issue of publication |
bib_month | The month or season of publication |
bib_suppl | The publication supplement |
bib_fpage | The first page of publication |
bib_lpage | The last page of publication |
bib_pagecount | The total page count for a reference (e.g., 420 p.) |
bib_unpubl | Pre-publication information such as “in press” |
bib_comment | A comment such as [Abstract] |
bib_confproceedings | The title of published conference proceedings |
bib_confpaper | The title of a paper in published conference proceedings |
bib_conflocation | The location of the conference |
bib_confdate | The date of the conference (month, day) |
bib_title | A title in a reference that is not an article or book title; typically used for titles of theses and dissertations |
bib_url | A URL included in a journal reference |
bib_doi | A DOI included in a journal reference |
Manual Editing and Reference Reprocessing
Once a reference has been tagged with a type (e.g., <jrn>, <unknown>), it will not be reprocessed if you rerun Bibliographic References. eXtyles ignores tagged entries on successive passes of this function. If you wish to reprocess a reference after making some changes to it, you can remove the reference type tag. For example, the following reference failed to process correctly due to the double punctuation after the volume number:
<unknown>Janmey, P. A. “Protein regulation by phosphatidylinositol lipids.” Chemistry & Biology 2;:1 (1995): 61–65. </unknown>
You can fix the punctuation manually—that is, delete the extra colon after the volume number— and then remove the reference type tags (by backspacing over the tag, or by selecting the tag and cutting it with Control-X) so that the reference looks like this:
Janmey, P. A. “Protein regulation by phosphatidylinositol lipids.” Chemistry & Biology 2;1 (1995): 61–65.
After selecting the Bibliographic References menu item again, the reference will be properly restructured as shown here:
<jrn>Janmey, PA. Protein regulation by phosphatidylinositol lipids. Chem. Bio. 1995;2(1): 61–65.</jrn>
Hiding the reference type tags is not the same thing as deleting them. To reprocess a reference, you must actually delete the tags at the start and end of a reference. Hiding them with the View Tags/Hide Tags menu item will make the tag disappear on screen, but it will not cause a reference to be reprocessed.
Do not copy reference type tags from one reference and paste them onto another reference. These tags may be applied only automatically by Bibliographic Reference processing or by using the Insert Tags option on the eXtyles menu. Copying and pasting these tags may cause failures in other Advanced Processing operations.
Errors can be fixed even without removing the colored highlights and styles. Bibliographic Reference processing removes all highlighting before reprocessing a reference. Colored highlights and styles are reapplied before the results of the Bibliographic Reference processing function are displayed on screen.
Bibliographic Reference Tagging Only
eXtyles for CADTH also has a Bibliographic Reference Tagging Only option on the Advanced Processing menu. This option allows you to process a reference list to achieve the format required for XML export but not restructure the references per any editorial style.
Notice that in this example, the page range after reference processing has not been expanded, as in the previous example.
This reference processing is useful for documents for which the reference list has already been carefully edited prior to eXtyles processing.