Fighting Reference Management Software

This weekend was making slow but sure progress until I had to put in a new citation for Halbwachs. This is a book published in 1929, but as he was French I am not reading the original but a translation. So I decided to follow up another little quirk that I have to deal with for my thesis. That is what to do with works that have at least two dates from publications; that is an original date and the date of the version I am quoting. I am using Mendeley, and the one thing Mendeley does not deal well with is this case. Basically, there is a field in Mendeley called "Original publication" and I can fill that field in, in Mendeley. There is also a field called "Original-date" in CSL, which is how you are supposed to tell Mendeley to format your references. You would think they were one and the same. They are not and I cannot find any way to get CSL to reference the original publication field.This is annoying as 50% of my citations have a different original publication to the copy I am using. One case is where I am using the paperback edition, and there has been a prior hardback edition. However, I have a fair few translated texts and several historical texts.

I asked my supervisor early on, and he was clear I needed to publication date of the copy I was using on the incline citation and original publication only in the Bibliography. Fine, so what I was planning on doing was finishing putting my thesis together, then take the Bibliography that was produced and edit it to put in each and every date! Time consuming but not half as much as hacking Mendeley this past summer was going to be.

He has changed his mind, a supervisors prerogative. I now need to have the original publication in the inline citation. That would mean hand editing every single citation and the Bibliograph. So I decided to try and hack Mendeley. At first there appeared to be no improvement. So I decided to go backwards and see if I could hack Endnote, but for this to be a viable option I needed to be able to import into Endnote. That took quite a while to work out and when I had worked it out I realised it was also not working correctly. Not all the "books" were labelled as "books". Given that I have about 500 references in Mendeley, going through and changing them all, plus putting all the information that was lost was going to be time consuming.

So back to Mendeley and then I found another post that told me a work around. Basically, I had to find a field that existed in both Mendeley and CSL had that I was not using. It took some finding but eventually I discovered that the field "genre" met the requirements. Then I can create my own citation style for my thesis. When I have that I can then play with it and get it so it looks right. I have got it to the proof of concept, but it will take several more hours to get it actually into a form that I want.

So I still have to finish the Tradition chapter. I am hoping to scrounge an extra day later in the week but hope to spend some evenings on it as well so I can justify having Christmas week off.