The standard dialogue displays one datafile entry at a time; it is also possible to enable a view that presents a list of records line by line. There are two sliders on the main dialogue: a vertical slider scrolls the fields, and a horizontal slider at the bottom provides for quick navigation through the entries. There is no delay in moving directly to the end of the database. One can find or find and replace text globally throughout the database.

Entries may be created in many forms: "Article in a Journal," "Book," "Chapter or Article in an Edited Book," etc. Entries may be unsigned. Entries may also be individual textual notes--quotations from books, lecture notes, correspondence, shopping lists, whatever. The user may provide these notes with keywords, thus permitting a nifty integration of text management and bibliography (more on this in Bibliography Generation).

Fields that may share values with other entries in the database (Author, Editor, Translator, Journal, Keywords) have drop-down lists containing all of the values for those fields in the database. This is a wonderful solution to the problem of providing quick access to standard field values (term lists) that one might otherwise enter repeatedly. No more arcane key sequences to bring up the list of journals: they're all one click away right in the "Journal" field. Journal names and publishers may be abbreviated; the translation tables are kept in files that may be edited with one's word processor.

A very attractive feature is the "Preview Box," which presents a "live" image of the current entry as it would be formatted in the selected style ( View 1). As one moves through the database with the page up/page down keys, this box is updated to reflect the formatted version of the new current entry.

The C7 manual recommends that all titles be entered sentence-style. This permits C7 to convert title capitalization to headline-style automatically (since only words other than the common articles the, an, a, le, la, etc., need be capitalized). This feature should be particularly handy for writers who write for both English and American presses which generally prefer different capitalization styles.

The on-line documentation is particularly helpful during data entry. A question frequently asked by users of bibliographical software concerns the format of field data. Should, for example, an "edition" include the abbreviation "ed." after the number? In the C7 help file's "Field Definitions" topic, one may click on "Issue/Edition" and discover that indeed one must provide this tag. The help file provides a complete description of the data entry formats for all of the fields, including treament of such thorny questions as the format of honorifics in name fields.

Importing/Exporting

Oberon provides procedures for importing from a number of bibliographic software programs, online databases, and CDROM formats, including the following: BIDS, Dialog, Refer (as produced by Endnote), Medlars/Medline, Ovid, ProQuest, RIS, Silver Platter, and Uncover's Reveal. Tools / Find Duplicates will provide a list of any records that have the same values for author, year, and title fields so that you can avoid duplicate entries when importing from various sources. I successfully converted a large Endnote database.

Oberon supplies custom formats that provide for export to Endnote (in Endnote's version of the Unix Refer format), Unix Refer, ProCite, and RIS.

Searching

The weakest part of C7 is its database functionality. The C7 datafile is an ordinary text file without any internal indices. Sorting and selecting records generate an entirely new file called "untitled," which may then be saved or abandoned as desired. For small to medium databases, however, speed on a newer system (the test system I used was a Pentium at 100 mhz) does not seem to be much of a problem: I was not annoyed by C7's performance when manipulating my sample datafile of about 1000 entries (0.27 meg).

C7 can sort on four fields. It is possible to select an ascending or descending sort, but this affects all of the keys. Thus it is not possible to do one sort where the author field is sorted in ascending fashion, with the year descending (you'll have to do two completely separate sorts). The two most common sorts--by author, year, and title, and by author, title, and year--are provided as quickly-selectable radio buttons. A sort of about 1000 entries on two fields on my 100mhz Pentium took less than 3 seconds.

Searching for all records according to criteria is limited. One is permitted two conditions, each of which may search in all fields or just one, for text that is contained, or not contained, in the field(s) (no greater than / less than). Furthermore, the search may be case-sensitive or may match whole words. The conditions may be "and-ed" or "or-ed." During browsing, individual fields may be tagged or untagged by pressing Control-T; tagged fields may be searched as a part of the first condition (but not, strangely enough, as the second condition). One cannot save search criteria.

Searching for records that match a given field is very convenient. As mentioned above, fields that may have standard values (keywords, journal names, publishers' names, etc.) have drop down lists so that on entry one can easily select an already-existing value already existing in the database. At the bottom of these drop-down lists is a search button, which means that it's a snap to find other records with the same keyword, name of a journal, or publisher, etc.

Bibliography Generation

C7's bibliography generation is slick. C7 excels in two ways: 1) the integration with the word processor (if one uses WordPerfect or MS Word) is as tight as anything else on the market; 2) formatting control for "custom" styles is extremely sophisticated.

To generate in-text citations or endnotes with an accompanying bibliography, one annotates one's text with "Access Keys" where one wishes a full citation to be provided. For a book written by Howard Zinn in 1980, a suitable Access Key would be {Zinn 1980}. Each entry in the datafile has an Access Phrase. The Access Keys found in a document match Access Phrases entered by the user in the datafile. An Access Key must be enclosed with curly braces. And finally, an Access Key may contain one or more Access Phrases.

Unlike other programs where the Access Phrase is generated by some kind of formula, in C7 the Access Phrase is entirely abitrary, and is up to the user. Furthermore, to avoid ambiguity when matching Access Phrases during bibliography generation, Access Phrases must be unique--and it's the user's responsibility to ensure that Access Phrases are unique. In its Preferences dialogue, C7 provides an option that will automatically generate Access Phrases based on author name and year of publication. But the user is still responsible for the uniqueness of Access Phrases. One workaround is to generate a list of duplicate records after each record has been added--this list conveniently provides a list of duplicate Access Phrases.

Once one has created a document annotated with Access Keys, one selects the menu item Generate/Citations for Document (View 2). All of the conventional bibliographical styles are available; C7 also provides a display of sample data in the current format if one needs to double-check the appearance. If WordPerfect or MS Word is currently running, on click makes C7 begin scanning the current document right in the word processor (if one is not using one of these two word processors, one must first save the file in RTF format--that file will be scanned on disk). Here one can control the format of in-text citations and the reference list. The in-text citations may be formatted as footnotes, endnotes, reference numbers, or in a variety of "short forms" [e.g., (Zinn 1980)]. The reference list can be generated in alphabetical order, or in order of appearance in the text. For both in-text citations and the reference list, abstracts may be included or not as the user sees fit.

A very exciting feature of C7 is the integration of notecards into the datafile. An Entry in the form "note" will have its entire "abstract" field inserted during generation. C7 provides a shorthand form so that a note will be followed by a correctly formatted bibliographical citation. C7 is also one of the few bibliographical software packages that offers its own spell-checking (the other is Reference Manager)--this is a handy feature if you plan to store your notes in the database rather than in word processor files. Additional spelling dictionaries (French, German, etc.) may be downloaded from the Oberon web site.

Formatting power: C7 does things that other formatters don't do. For example, in the Chicago style, if editor and translator are the same, C7 doesn't lamely list the name twice; it correctly prefixes the name with "Edited and translated by." Another plus is that when the user specifies a page number in her Access Key, that page will substitute for any pages given in the database for the note; while in the bibliography, the full page numbers will be given. It is wonderful to see this attention to detail.

Subsequent citations: It is now possible for C7 to insert a short form for the second and later occurrences of individual references. The user must provide the short form in the database. This is a helpful solution to an old problem, but there is still room for automation here.

In-text citations: If the user wishes, C7 can replace an access key with a short in-text citation. A typical in-text citation might look like this: (Wilson, 1987: 70). C7 now provides for access keys which control how much of the in-text citation should appear. The appearance of the prefix ! suppresses the author's name, and @ suppresses the year. Thus the access key {!@Wilson, 1987: 70} would result in a bare (70). This is a helpful aid for those who use the MLA style where parts of the in-text citation are suppressed depending on the context (I will spare you my sermon on the unwieldiness of the MLA style--see sidebar).

Discursive notes: C7 allows access keys to appear inside footnotes and endnotes. This means that you can write discursive footnotes.

Custom styles: One of the most powerful features of C7 is the capability to use custom styles to format references. Custom styles are very much like the format styles for the old Notebook II program (Oberon started as a supplier of custom styles for that program, and they seem to have absorbed that technology). The custom styles are enormously feature-rich, permitting control over some of the most arcane aspects of bibliographical styles--for example, the formatting of page numbers (when should there be a leading zero?), author initials, and capitalization algorithms.

General Assessment

C7 is a fine program with an elegantly balanced set of features. It has a number of features that should be the envy of its competitors--especially its slick integration with the major word processors and its "preview box," which shows a "live" formatted reference for the current entry in the datafile. The formatting is simply wonderful. The major packages all brag about their formatting power, but C7 is the only one that can't be stumped.

The major liability of C7 is its weak database functionality. With large databases, one frequently needs to search for references within a certain time frame or according to other complicated criteria--this isn't possible in C7 (though one could obtain some of this information through the use of sorts). Numerous operations require a sequential access of the entire database--in other words, one must wait after loading, sorting, or selecting according to criteria.

There are still opportunities for improvement in Citation 7:

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