I’m working on an academic paper in law. For managing my sources I use the reference function of Word 2016. This allows me, of course, to add sources, select a category for the source, fill in the metadata details, and Word will automatically generate the bibliography entry and footnote wording for that source based on the details I’ve entered. I can select the citation style I want, and all the bibliography entries and footnotes will be automatically adjusted based on how that style presents the details of the sources. So far, so good.
My problem now is that I’m going to cite, among others, a lot of court cases from various jurisdictions. These jurisdictions all have different commonly accepted citation styles for court cases. Some use party names, others don’t; some use case numbers, others don’t; some use reporter or journal details, others don’t. All these are fields available in Word when I add the source, but the ways of presenting these details in the bibliography and the footnotes differ vastly.
I’m therefore looking for an easy way to customise a citation style. My idea is to create different categories of sources, such as “case from country X”, “case from country Y”, etc. For each of these, I would define the way the source details are presented in the bibliography and the footnotes.
Is there a way to do this easily? From what I could find out so far, it can be done with VBA, but I suppose that requires quite some coding and programming fu, which I don’t have. My ideal would be to get a tool which allows me to create and customise my citation style on the basis of a kind of WYSIWYG interface. Is there anything lie hat on the market?
Do your whole document in one style, entering all the info you can.
When the document is done, save the first version using one style.
Save another version using the second style.
Save a third version using the third style (etc.)
Copy/paste as plain text the myriad bibliographies into a final “for publication” version.
That way you get the advantages of Word still managing footnotes and such all in one place (version one) but for publication you can still maintain each citation’s preferred format.
Buuuuuut it’s kinda weird that the recipients of the document want each citation in its original format (chosen by the original authors) instead of being formatted uniformly for the intended audience. Are you sure that’s what they intended?
That might work for the bibliography, but I think for the footnotes the whole process would be quite cumbersome. It’s not a journal article, it’s a doctoral thesis of a few hundred pages and hundreds of footnotes. Manually going through all these would be a pain. But I have, in fact, thought of citing that category of source in plain text rather than the reference function. Probably it is indeed the best way, even though it doesn’t feel quite like good practice to me.
Well, I’m far from the publication stage, so it’s pretty much up to me to decide how I format my text. But the way court cases are usually cited in footnotes in, say, Germany is quite different from the way it is done in, say, England; either country’s normal style would look odd to a reader from the other.
I’ve got no idea how to respond to your inquiry (heck, I have trouble with styles in Word, so you’re way ahead of me with your fancy-schmancy metadata stuff ), but I’m always interested in comparative law - what’s your paper about?
It’s in public international law. I want to look at scenarios where two states (or other subjects of international law) conclude treaties which, indirectly, have an effect upon the rights of third parties and which thus constitute actual (or only seeming, that’s the gist of the study) exceptions to the pacta tertiis nec nocent nec prosunt rule according to which treaties don’t affect third parties. I use a number of national court cases for analogies, comparison etc.
Does Word 2016 support multiple simultaneous citation styles? So you have Style A for German law, Style B for American Law, Style C for EU law, and so on?
The usual tool is an add on for Word. Endnote. The downside is that it is not exactly cheap. The upside is that it is actually very good. Many journals have Endnote styles ready to use, so you can get things working very quickly and with a very high chance of success without much effort.
Word IMHO is simply not really a tool suited to any purpose, but it seems to remain popular. In the sciences you would be writing in LaTeX and using BibTeX.
Microsoft Word can, via a plug-in if not directly, make use of BibTeX styles and BibTeX databases. But the question was how to mix different citation and bibliography styles in the same document, which is not the default way BibTeX works (you typically select a single style). I am not even sure it is as simple as writing a custom BibTeX style, nor is that a WYSIWYG procedure.
ETA customised citation formats may be slightly easier to produce in ConTeXt instead of BibTeX. Disadvantages: also not WYSIWYG, still requires some amount of fu, and he would have to dump his entire text out of Word and into ConTeXt (no question it would look better, though.)
I’m not sure about that. There is a menu item that lets you select the citation style, but it’s just a selector that lets you make the chocie for the whole document. But I’ll dig a bit into that to see if that can be customised.
), but I’m always interested in comparative law - what’s your paper about?