Multi-Reference Citations in Word 2007
As I was looking at the way Word 2007 now implements citation coding, started to worry. Using a token to represent the reference information is awkward with a single reference, but what happens if you need to include multiple; e.g. (Doe, 1999; Smith, 1998)? Did they not include this option?
My tech guy got me access to the Word 2007 beta, so I just checked for myself. It turns out Word 2007 does allow multiple citations. However, it is quite limited at the moment, not allowing you to order the fields, or in any way modify the formatting. This would be a deal-breaker for many scholars, including me.
Moreover, the formatting system does not properly implement author-year styles, including APA. If you read this excellent overview of APA, for example. it says:
If you are citing more than one work from the same year, use the suffixes “a,”"b,”"c” etc., so that your reader can differentiate between them (these suffixes will correspond to the order of entries in your references page)
Now, observe how Word’s XSLT-based formatting system address this issue:
Instead of properly adding suffixes, it instead adds the titles to disambiguate. No journal would accept this sort of gross error.
Hmm, this is one of the reasons I was saying using XSLT 1.0 to format citation properly is difficult. Citeproc handles this all correctly, incidentally, and it took me a long time to figure it out, with a lot of help from XSLT experts like Michael Kay and Jenni Tennison. I still haven’t implemented another little wrinkle, which is to disambiguate multi-reference citations where two different authors share the same last name.
Now, what about the XML?
So, yes, it supports multi-reference citations, but only in the most awkward of ways. Everything is crammed into a single, largely opaque, attribute value.
I just discovered that Word does allow local style modification. Oops; more below.
… so wait, I was wrong; Word does allow editing of local citations. Here’s the contextual menu:
… and here is the actual dialog.
In general, this is well-done. However, it makes a problematic assumption that a user will only ever be using page numbers to identify a location within a document. In law and history, they often use paragraph, and even line, numbers. And sometimes they are combined. This is why in ODF we have separate elements—cite:detail—to encode this. Also, they might add an option to suppress automatic-ordering, which is a feature they need to add.
Here is what happens when you save the file:
I can only assume that the \m and \s flags are used to suppress output.
