Inadequacies Chorus « Electronic Research « Notes
» The Subtle Inadequacies of Bibliographical Software
July 25, 1997
By John G. Norman

Let me begin with a challenge to the authors of bibliography software for PCs: There is no bibliographical software that can handle all of the following problems faced every day by scholars in the humanities and social sciences.

I will occasionally mention EndNote 2.1 and Citation 7 as examples. These are exemplary programs, and one reason I'm using them as illustrative examples is because they're so good. They're also the packages I know best. If you have supplementary evidence from other packages, please send them on to me at Norman.49@osu.edu and I'll integrate them into this document.

  • The great race: Which bibliographical package will be first to work as a back-end to a web server? We would now like to publicize our painfully-built special interest bibliographies by making them searchable on the web. If you do this, do it right-solicit lots of feedback before design. At the very minimum, searches should be output in a number of styles, include styles for export (especially Refer); users should be able to request that the results of a search be emailed to them.

    The time is right for this feature; Microsoft's Front Page, which will be a part of some future version of Microsoft Office, will include a personal web server--any prospective bibliographical database "back-end" should work with this product.

  • Insert formatted reference at the point of citation. This feature is only partially supported. After considerable clamor, this feature was added to EndNote-but only inside of notes. Citation 7 also supports it (only) inside notes, but it's a bit awkward (see my recent review).

    The problem is that the feature needs to be supported everywhere in the document. Why? Because in the humanities and social sciences we frequently write bibliographical essays, where we would like to have our temporary citations in the body of a document replaced with a full bibliographical reference. On occasion, developers have asked me if people actually write such bibliographical essays--well of course they do! A fine recent example is David T. Patterson's new book Grand Expectations in the Oxford History of the United States.

    The work-around is to write your bibliographical essay inside of a note. Gross!

  • Include page numbers specified in the temporary citation in the formatted reference. Citation 7 does this nicely; EndNote doesn't. This is particularly important in note forms. In most cases, one would want the cited page numbers to override database page numbers in the note; but in the bibliographical entry at the end of the document, one would want the page numbers from the database.

  • Key documentation to official style specifications. I believe this would flush out many oversights in the existing programs. For instance, how in EndNote would one format a volume in a multi-volume work where the individual volume has its own title? In The Chicago Manual of Style (13th ed.), this is discussed at 16.42. It would be so helpful to be able to search the provided sample database for something like "Chicago 16.42" and then see an example of a reference formatted according. Note that EndNote doesn't have an existing style for this frequently encountered type of reference: Working more closely with the existing documentation would help the developers deliver a more complete product.

  • Allow the user to cite works "silently"-such works would appear in the bibliography but not in the body. Citation 7 supports, EndNote doesn't.

  • Support the MLA style more fully. The MLA style [E.g., Joseph Gibaldi, MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 4th ed. [New York: MLA, 1995]) is especially problematic for bibliography generation. There are two problems: 1) The in-text citation is dependent on the contents of the final bibliography. For example, the MLA tells us that if there are two authors named "Patterson," they should be disambiguated with a first initial (p. 185). If more than one source is cited by the same author, part of the title for each source is specified in the in-text citation (p. 105). The horrible consequence of this logic is that if you add one source towards the end of a long chapter, you may very well have to go back and change an earlier citation to eliminate a potential ambiguity. (How the MLA could have come up with such a nasty system seemingly designed to complicate automation is beyond the scope of this discussion.) 2) If you mention the author's name in the citing sentence, then you leave the author out of the in-text citation. The first problem should certainly be solvable; for the second, perhaps the program might offer degrees of "aggression" in searching the citing sentence for information that might then be removed from the in-text citation.

  • Improve your styles definition. EndNote is hampered by a too-simple structure for the definition of styles. It is impossible in EndNote to specify a style that can format publication location, publisher, and date for all cases of missing data.