I am working on a report for an inter-governmental organisation (IGO). The report will probably be 200 pages long when done. Currently the bibliography has about 250 references, which are cited within the text of the report. The citations use the standard format of (author, year) or Author (Year), depending on the sentence.
Now I have been told by the project manager (from the IGO) that the in-sentence citations need to be (author year, page): with no comma in between author and year, and the page of the reference that the information is taken from.
The comma is no big thing. But in all my years in the field of biology, I have never seen citations that included a page number. For some references it would be possible to cite a page, but in many cases the information is a synthesis of a number of pages. In other cases, the reference is a website.
Has anyone ever encountered this kind of citation style before? If so, in what field?
And does anyone have any idea of how to set up Endnote software to do this?
Pinpoint citations to page or paragraph numbers are standard in legal writing. Afraid I can’t help you with Endnote, though - I just use Word, cursed be its name.
Interesting. So maybe their style guide was written by a lawyer? Thanks…given that this report is biological in nature, rather than a legal document, perhaps I can use that to push back and get them to reconsider…
Sorry to ruin your lawyer argument, but I have always assumed the page number has to be included when you are not referring to the whole book or whole paper. My Australian PhD was done that way. One of the examiners was American who commented how pleased he was that this approach had been adopted.
My PhD was then published by Cambridge University Press, coming out of the US, and again they were very strict that every page was given not only for quotes but for any reference which related to a specific portion of the source. My field is interdisciplinary, but published by Cambridge as archaeology. The requirement to include page numbers is the university standard here in Australia.
If it is a synthesis of a number of pages, you include each of the page spans, separated by commas.
I use Endnote but the page numbers were only included in-text, not in the citation, and added by hand.
In Endnote, if you cannot find an appropriate output style amongst the ones provided by Endnote, you can define your own: Edit/Output style/Style Manager. You can include any field from the records in your Endnote library.
My wife just completed a degree standard theology course and that’s exactly the style that they insisted on. I did the proof-reading so I had to check every single one. We used Word though which worked out pretty well.
I’d be keen to be able to do this. I have only ever used a standard Harvard citation output as that is the style for my university. A given reference could be used for a number of quotes at different parts of the text, so how would Endnote distinguish which page you want for a given in-text reference?
I would be very surprised if you can’t find an extant EndNote style that fits the bill. As noted above, creating your own styles isn’t all that hard anyway. What you do need to do is ensure your base database is properly curated. Anything that involves hand additions to the text should be avoided if at all possible.
Of course this is why BibTeX is such a nice way to go. But sadly Word has insinuated itself into so many parts of life, and the problems it generates never go away.,
I co-authored a publication in social sciences (I’m a biologist) and we did that. What a headache. It’s definitely not a bench science style either, but common in the social sciences.
