Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 4260
Proposals for Bibliographic facility enhancements.
Last modified: 2017-05-20 11:28:01 UTC
I would like to start a discussion regarding the implementation of the Bibliography database function. I am willing to take on a role in formulating requirements for this if it is required. I am David Wilson. I have had some 20 years professional IT experience, which included database and application design, but I am a terrible programmer. Currently I am writing a MA thesis in history and I use OpenOffice (641) on Linux. This is my first posting here so please forgive if have missed some of the previous discussion, and please let me know if I am on the wrong track here. The Current Facilities In the current version (641) we have the old StarOffice 5.2 Bibliographic database and its simple reference insertion process. When an OpenOffice bibliographic entry is dragged onto a document, a dialog box opens which allows one to select the fields we want for the entry. This is saved so next time we can just drag the field entry into the text. For example ?Oisin and Patrick? in Irish Myths and Legends, Lady Gregory. (London: Running Press, 1989) 412-421. This fine for a book entry but if I next need an Journal article entry I have to adjust the field list to look like ? T.M. Charles-Edwards, Honour and status in Some Irish and Welsh Prose Tales. in Eriu, xxxvi 1978.? Then I may need to insert an article in book, then a paper from conference proceedings, ect. It does not support the character formating, I have to adjust this myself. This was just not practicable. We also have the new ?Insert>Indexes and Tables>Bibliographic Entry?. This does will not select entries from the current bibliographic database on my system. But I assume that this will be fixed in a later version. It does allow me to add Bibliographic entries for the document, add references into the text and to produced a Bibliography. The format of the Bibliography can be finely controlled (it has character formating) and this is a very good piece of design and implementation. The Issue But these is one major problem with this. It seems to support only one of the commonly used citation methods ? ? the parenthetical or author date-method, and does not support the other common method - the footnote or endnote method. We I add a ?Insert>Indexes and Tables>Bibliographic Entry? it asks me to select the short name (the Citation Identifier) and it pasts this as a field into the document - (WILSON2002). Proposal I propose that we support the footnote or endnote method as well. This defined in the ?Chicago Manual of Style? (Documentation is on the web at http://www.fsu.edu/~library/guides/chicago.html .). A suggestion is that the ?Bibliographic Entry? Dialog box allow the selection between the two methods, this would select for the insertion of the ?Short name? or for the formated text string similar to that defined for the Bibilography entries. This would not be too difficult to do. Ideally support could also be developed for the style convention that the first mention of a reference contain the full detail as and all subsequent references use the shorter version - ?Oisin and Patrick? in Irish Myths and Legends, 412-421. (without the publication details.) Even better would be to select the style conventions predefined and to be able to select the style required - such as Chicago, APS, Harvard, ect. It might be consided that the Style Convention attribute should be applied to the document as a whole, to avoid mixtures of styles, and examiners red marks. Also selection of a document style could also set other document defaults, such as spacing, heading format etc. This would greatly facilitate the accurate setting up of the document format ( I have not looked far into this aspect). As facility of importing Style Conventions would be required. Endnote provides style definitions to the general public which could be imported if their import format was decoded. http://www.endnote.com/support/enstylesfinder.asp We will have reached nirvana when, we can write one paper and just by selecting the required document Style Convention, print off submissions to numerous journals (all with different strictly enforced style conventions). Also we will have just about replaced Endnotes (TM), which will save many thousands of poor university students hundreds of dollars, euros etc. I welcome any comments or suggestions. Regards David Wilson
Éric, please have a look, feel free to comment and forward to CJ (if you see further problems that may be turned into bugs, do so). Reassigned to Éric.
Indeed I this is an important feature (a pretty frequently ask one!).
this is very important. i can't see where to vote for this bug on the page but +1.
I have received an email from B.M. Who is writing up his master's thesis for the University of Antwerp, Belgium. His problem is that he needs to cite reference using the format: (Author, year: page) where page is the exact page or pages in the book/article/whatever where the relevant information was found. But there is currently no way in which the OpenOffice user can add the page numbers within the fixed brackets [ ] of the Bibliographic field. If the user creates a citation identifier (short name) for each document and page number range and all these entries show up in the Bibliographic Table - that is multiple entries for books and articles with different page references, which we do not want. I (DNW) suggest two options for solving this the problem of adding page numbers to the in-text style which requires [Author, Date: Page numbers] eg. [dwilson,2002: 23-45]. 1. explicitly support this style of referencing, The insert bibliography entry dialog box would have a new text entry field for the page numbers so that the reference would show [Author, date: page]. But the page numbers would be ignored for the purposes of building up the Bibliographic table. Or 2.Provide an Option to suppress the brackets [ ] around the field, the user could then add text before or after the field entry and provide any brackets required. This would be easier but less elegant I have added this proposal to the full proposal outlined on my web page http://www.users.bigpond.com/dnwilson
What about a field editor for user to decide, which fields should be generated for citation? This could help users to generate a formated model useful for writing scientific documents.
Oliver could you please take a look at Davids proposal? In my opinion his feature requests are very interesting and reasonable. I possible, we should make these changes to OO.o 2.0.
adding louis
Accepted and component changed to sw
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Refering to issue 28574: - Insert - Index - Bibliography entry -> the list should be alphabetically sorted - It should be possible to sort the fields of the Bibliography database alphabetically and to save this order when living the database
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There have already been a lot of very good suggestions in this subject, but i have a few that i think would make the bibliography even better. I don't have very much experience with programming, so i don't know how difficult it is to implement. But they would be wonderful to have. Auto complete in Author: In science a lot of the papers are written by the same authors, so if program could suggest the names you have used before it would be really nice. Import files from Reference manager. This program is widely used on our university so it would be nice if we could import these files. I'm trying to figure out how the files work, but I'm not very good at that. Key Words. In Ref. manager it is possible to input keywords and search them, This is a very useful feature when you have more than 500 references. Keywords are also used again and again so an auto complete would also be useful.
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In my opinion the essential features needed to tempt users away from the Word/Reference Manager combo are: 1. Easy import of internet reference searches e.g. medline etc 2. Support for different output styles (e.g. Harvard, Vancouver, endnote, footnote etc) and the ability to reformat to switch between styles at will. 3. A way to import references from Reference Manager, EndNote etc, as many users will have many hundreds of references in these programs and will not switch unless they can take their references with them 4. An ability to search through the references for keywords, authors etc to enable those with large databases to find the reference they need to insert. 5. Ideally the ability to link a reference to a file (for example I have a lot of scientific papers as pdf files, and reference manager allows me to insert a link to the file location so that I can open the file from the reference to check details etc). I don't have any programming knowledge so don't know how difficult this will be to implement, but as a user I would say that the above features are a minimum for a realistic attempt at a bibliographic project in this day and age. Dennis Freshwater
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Another issue that needs to be addressed in the bibliography database is the sorting function. When used to create a list of references for an APA style paper, the references need to be sorted by (Author, Date) sequence, which is straightforward enough, but references without an identifiable author (such as a web page) need to be listed by the title of the article and alphabatized in the list accordingly. The only work-arounds I can think of for this as it currently stands are very awkward and/or a lot of extra work. This issue, combined with others already mentioned, make the bibliography function useless for APA formatted papers.
I'm aware that there have already been postings about the importance to be able to import EndNote files (or Reference Manager etc). Just one piece of more information : EndNote V7 actually allows the export of its datafile in XML format. I seems to me that it is a main issue to use XML in OO whereever possible, so I'm astonished that I was not able to find a way to import an XML database file from EndNote into the Bibliographic database. I searched help, I searched issus, so finally I decided to add a comment to this issue. If import of XML databases is already possible, I excuse myself but would be very glad to know how it is done. If not, it would be a nice enhancement to have.
"lillefrog In Ref. manager it is possible to input keywords and search them, This is a very useful feature when you have more than 500 references. Keywords are also used again and again so an auto complete would also be useful." I have that much references in my dissertation work and it is VERY annoying to find one. It will be very useful to make a filtering option by fields, sorting by fields and viewing by fields (not only short names). Only keywords will not help with "more than 500 references".
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Documentation of the Bibliographic Database proposals are now on a wiki page - http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Bibliographic_Database
I changed the Summary description to better describe the status of the project. Note: details of our bibliographic enhancements are now at http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Bibliographic_Project's_Developer_Page
How can an issue with 144 votes be only priority P5? P5 means that the behavior "rarely affects anybody noticeably", but this is the issue with the second most number of votes. IMO this issue has to be at least P4.
I just wanted to let all interested users know that we have planned to enhance the bibliographic support in OOo in a more general way, first wrt. the file format and the necessary counter part in the document core model in Writer. Discussions about details can be restarted once this will be done. We are waiting for the ODF 1.2 specification that amongst other things will describe the handling of bibliographic data. At least we have to wait unti the content of the spec had stabilized enough to justify working on its implementation. As this will be quite some work to do we wouldn't complain if other developers joined us implementing all the stuff. :-)
This is great news! And could find its way into a blog, say, or other news. louis
I really want to see OOo bibliographic component improved, but I don't want it to lose the features and functionality it already has. It is a really important feature for me to put the authors name in drop caps. I have many colleague who need to put either the authors or the books in drop caps. Bibus, for example, doesn't allow that, but OpenOffice.org current bibliography component does. I can work around the OOo shortcomings, but Bibus is just useless for me because it doesn't allow drop caps. I just hope the new OOo bibliographic component is as customizable as the old one in order to not lose this kind of functionality.
I will be grateful if you could test my proposed fix for this issue: http://www.dusystems.com/oobf.html
bornmw: maybe someone else can find time to test it (I can't), but the problem is that this solution only solves the most simple problem of the current bibliographic support. The plan has been to move the bibliographic supporting to adopting the new generic metadata encoding and field solution coming in ODF 1.2 (and planned for OOo 3.0). So think of something like how the Zotero OOo plug-in works, only using a standard field (instead of bookmarks) and where the metadata for the references gets embedded in the file package in a separate RDF/XML file.
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Reset assigne to the default "issues@openoffice.apache.org".