Because I often use substantive footnotes, I’ve long used Chicago-style author–date citations to keep the two entities separate, so I’m quite familiar with Chicago style and with manually managing such references. Given the number of papers that I write, and that I seldom change citation styles, it is difficult for me to justify the cost of a reference manager such as EndNote.
I recently tried handling references with Word 2013, and in the first paper I tried to convert, I encountered numerous problems. I cite just a few examples; all citations of the Chicago Manual of Style are to the 16th edition:
- Quoted items (e.g., journal articles) in reference lists appear in straight quotes ... um, get serious—it’s no longer 1985.
- Multiple entries in parentheses are separated by commas rather than semicolons (CMOS 15.29). APA style manages to get this right.
- The citation of a work with three authors is missing the comma before “and” (CMOS 15.9, Book with Multiple Authors).
- Unknown author or no author. In the reference list, the date rather than the title is shown first (CMOS 15.32). The entry in the list still appears as if the list were alphabetized by the title. Turabian style seems to get this right, with the title appearing first.
- Repeated names in the reference list are replaced with a dash only for a few kinds of works (e.g., if the second occurrence is a journal article, the name is repeated). Moreover, the replacement is a single em dash rather than a 3-em dash (CMOS 15.17).
Ostensibly, it makes far more sense to use a shared, format-independent database of sources than to make every entry manually. But Word’s current implementation is so bad that it is essentially useless. Although it sorta kinda gives results that sorta kinda resemble the indicated styles, it is unlikely that these results would be acceptable in an application that actually required the indicated style.
Some of the problems can be addressed fairly simply by modifying the XSL file for Chicago style. Because—at least as far as I know—the XML schema used by many of the basic templates are not available, so the only solution is to essentially hack the templates by adding hard-coded values. This isn’t elegant, but it’s not likely that I will ever use other than US English, so it probably isn’t a serious problem for me.
Other problems—such as replacement of repeated names in a reference list with 3-em dashes are not as easily addressed because it is no mean feat to analyze and modify an uncommented 7800-line file. And there is something positively absurd about thousands of users doing this individually rather than having Microsoft get it right in the first place.
I am well aware that I am far from the first person to encounter the problems I’ve mentioned. I mention them mainly to add one more voice to a call for a workable implementation of this feature.
Ideally, Microsoft would bite the bullet and revise the XSL files so the results match the styles to which they correspond. Alternatively, the task of fixing the XSL files would be much easier if developer materials—including the XML schema and perhaps commented XSL files were made available.
Does anyone else have any experience or insight into addressing these issues?
Jeff Conrad
