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Reference Processing and Validation

There are some circumstances in which you may need to manually edit or reprocess references.

Common Reason to Reprocess a Reference

• There is a specific problem with the format of the original reference that can be corrected to facilitate correct eXtyles Reference Processing

Common Reason to Manually Edit a Reference

• The reference is of a type that eXtyles Reference Processing does not restructure and therefore must be manually edited

Reprocessing References

If eXtyles Reference Processing has failed to properly identify a reference type, resulting in the reference not being correctly restructured, you can most likely make a slight adjustment to the reference and then reprocess it to achieve correct restructuring and styling.

Follow these steps to reprocess a reference.

1. Remove the reference-type tags from the reference you want to reprocess

eXtyles will ignore already tagged references (e.g., <jrn>, <unknown>) when Reference Processing is rerun. To ensure that your problematic reference is reprocessed, you will need to remove the incorrect tags that eXtyles inserted. There are two ways to remove reference-type tags:

• Manually remove them. Simply place your cursor at the end of the first (opening) tag and backspace once to highlight the tag and twice to delete it. Repeat this process for the second (end) tag.

• Automatically remove them. You can also use the Post-Processing Cleanup dialog to automatically remove the reference-type tags. To do this, select (highlight) the entire reference in Word, open the PPC dialog and ensure that all options are cleared (i.e., not checked). Select “Remove eXtyles tags” with the correct reference paragraph style selected, and click OK.

2. Make an edit to the reference

eXtyles Reference Processing can be tripped up by inconsistent or incorrect punctuation or unexpected content in the reference. Making a small edit to the reference text to correct these issues can help. When doing this it is important to control your variables; that is, you want to make only one change to the reference at a time in your attempts to get Reference Processing to work correctly on the reference.

3. Rerun eXtyles Reference Processing

Because you removed the reference-type tags in step 1 of this process, eXtyles Reference Processing will only act on the reference paragraph that does not have tags, leaving the rest of the reference list alone. With the manual editing you performed in step 2, you should see improved Reference Processing results. If not, perform these steps again, making a different editorial change in step 2, until you achieve the correct results.

Example The following reference failed to process correctly due to the double punctuation after the volume number: Open Following the steps outlined earlier, you can fix the punctuation manually—that is, remove the reference-type tags and delete the extra colon after the volume number so that the reference looks like this: Open Then, rerun Reference Processing from the eXtyles ribbon and the reference will be properly restructured:

Manually Edit a Reference

As described in the section What to Expect from Reference Processing, some reference types will never be restructured by eXtyles. These reference types include conference proceedings, legal references, thesis/dissertations, and other types of grey literature.

In these cases, you will need to manually copyedit the content of the reference to achieve your organization’s editorial style.

Further, and importantly, it is not necessary for these types of references to have character styles fully applied to all elements of the reference.

However, 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 (see the following section, “Manually Character Styling the References”).

Manually Character Styling References

During reference processing, eXtyles automatically applies colored Word character styles (i.e., bib_article, bib_journal, etc.) to semantically meaningful parts of the reference. These character styles are then used by subsequent eXtyles Advanced Processes and XML Export (see Reference Processing and Character Styles).

The best way to apply character styles to a reference is to have eXtyles processes do it automatically. However, there are some circumstances where you may need to manually apply character styles to parts of a reference entry.

Format Painter

The Format Painter option on the Word Home ribbon allows you to essentially copy the formatting of one piece of text and paste it on to another piece of text. To use Format Painter to apply character styles, simply

1. Place your cursor in the text that is already formatted with a style you want to apply elsewhere

2. Click Format Painter

3. Select with your cursor the text you want to apply the style to, and Format Painter will “paint” the style you copied in step 2 onto the new text

Word Style Pane

You can also apply character styles via Word’s Style pane. In Word you access this pane by either:

• Home tab > Styles or

• Control + Alt + Shift + S

Highlight the text you want to apply the character style to, and then select the character style from the Word style pane.

Note that character styles should be applied only to the actual content that is typically highlighted, not to surrounding punctuation.