Trouble with citations

[kjmatthews]

I am finding Mellel's handling of citations problematic. I am used to having to enter all citations and bibliographic entries myself, and I would very much like for Mellel's integration with Bookends to work for me, but I neither User Guide is helping very much. These questions will be framed within MLA textual citation/bibliographic guidelines.

What I can't seem to determine is whether, with Mellel, I should enter citations as reference objects only the first time I cite a particular work (so that it gets added to the bibliography at the end) and then enter each subsequent citations of that work manually, or enter every citation in the document as a separate reference object, whether the work has been previously cited or not.

If the latter is the case, is Mellel smart enough to, upon scanning the document, realize when two consecutive citations are citing the same work, and that it should therefore leave out the author's name: just (36) instead of (Author 36). If not, how does one suppress the author's name?

Here is a sample paragraph that demonstrates how, ideally, textual citations would end up. The first two and fourth quotes come from the same work, with a citation from another work intervening:

Blah blah blah blah (Author1 36) blah blah blah (42). Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah (Author2 75). Blah blah blah (Author1 47).

Thanks for any help you can give!

[ozean]

What I can't seem to determine is whether, with Mellel, I should enter citations as reference objects only the first time I cite a particular work (so that it gets added to the bibliography at the end) and then enter each subsequent citations of that work manually, or enter every citation in the document as a separate reference object, whether the work has been previously cited or not.

You should enter all of them separately.

If the latter is the case, is Mellel smart enough to, upon scanning the document, realize when two consecutive citations are citing the same work, and that it should therefore leave out the author's name: just (36) instead of (Author 36). If not, how does one suppress the author's name?

It is smart enough to recognize this, however, it will not leave out the author’s name without you telling it to. More information on that can be found in the User Guide but as a quick info: you have to enter a % sign at the beginning of the object to tell Mellel/Bookends to leave out the authors name.

Hope this helps, but I definitely would recommend some more in-depth studying of the relevant chapter in Mellel’s user guide.

[kjmatthews]

you have to enter a % sign at the beginning of the object to tell Mellel/Bookends to leave out the authors name

I saw that in the guide as well, but while the % leaves out the author's name, it forces display of the date. Is there any way to suppress both?

[ozean]

You could enter a ! at the beginning of the quote – but I guess that would tell Mellel to not display the citation in the text at all (it would be displayed only in the bibliography). I have never tried to enter a ! citation that includes something in backward slashes \ - usually this would force the contents between the backwards slashes to be displayed… maybe you could experiment with that.

Otherwise I guess you have a feature request for Jon from Sonnysoftware and for the Redlers.

[danzac]

you have to enter a % sign at the beginning of the object to tell Mellel/Bookends to leave out the authors name

I saw that in the guide as well, but while the % leaves out the author's name, it forces display of the date. Is there any way to suppress both?

You do not need to use the % sign if you don't want to. In the Bookends format, in the bib & citation options, you can tell Bookends to only use the date for subsequent citations.

What you seem to want is just the page number for immediately subsequent citations, right? Is this what MLA requires, or is it how you like to do it? as far as I understood, MLA wants date and pg# for subsequent citations. If you quoted the same work 10 pages down you would obviously need the date in there.

If this is MLA practice, I would request this of Jon at Sonnysoftware (do it on the forum). Ask if there can be an option in the bib&citation options to ignore author and date for immediately subsequent citations. Point out that it is MLA practice (official documentation).

[kjmatthews]

What you seem to want is just the page number for immediately subsequent citations, right? Is this what MLA requires, or is it how you like to do it? as far as I understood, MLA wants date and pg# for subsequent citations. If you quoted the same work 10 pages down you would obviously need the date in there.

My understanding of MLA is that page numbers only are used for immediately subsequent citations (36), author and page number are used to cite a work for the first time and for non-immediately-subsequent citations (Matthews 36), and that titles only used to clarify between two works by the same author (Matthews, Mellel request 36).

This seems to be confirmed by the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers in section 5.3-5.4 and the Style Manual for Scholarly Publications in sections 7.3-7.4. I will submit the request.

[rpcameron]

In either case, this is not really an issue in Mellel's handling of the citation objects, but rather in Bookends' processing and formatting of the citations before it hands the information back to Mellel as formatted text. As others have suggested, your best bet is to make requests on the Bookends forum, since that's where the major citation handling is down (not in Mellel).

[kjmatthews]

In either case, this is not really an issue in Mellel's handling of the citation objects, but rather in Bookends' processing and formatting of the citations before it hands the information back to Mellel as formatted text. As others have suggested, your best bet is to make requests on the Bookends forum, since that's where the major citation handling is down (not in Mellel).

That the processing was done in Bookends and not Mellel is what I was not getting, despite the fact that it ought to be quite obvious, so my apologies for being dense.

After writing to the Bookends folks, it still think it would be nice if Mellel had a flag to suppress both the author AND the date within a textual citation, as Bookends is not (currently) capable of handling subsequent citations like MLA calls for. For now it looks like I'll have to keep editing the fomatted citations myself.

[danzac]

Mellel does not edit the content of the citations sent from Bookends, just the formatting.

This is definitely a Bookends issue, and if it is the official way to do MLA, then Jon at Bookends would definitely work towards implementing it.