change "year" field to more flexible "date" field
"Year" is an inadequate field for a lot of citations in, for example, the field of History. It is not uncommon for "September 2006" to be a recommended citation form, or "November/December 2005", or spanning years. More importantly, for things like citations of newspaper articles, a simple year is *not* sufficient -- exact dates must be cited for them to be found by others if the articles are not online (common, again, for historians). The current "year" field is too inflexible and the way in which it quietly deletes any more complicated information you put into it is really unacceptable. It severely reduces the use of this product by people who need to be able to cite more specific dates.
fastfission
shared this idea
There seem to be several requests here.
1. It is possible to import months/days by going into ‘View’ —> ‘Document Details’ and ticking ‘Months’ and ‘Day’ for the relevant document type. Citation styles can be changed to incorporate these through the CSL editor in 1.7 (due for release later in 2012).
2. Ranges of dates (eg. “1822-24”), these are currently not supported.
3. Dates which are approximate or have some other qualification (eg. “~1700”)
4. The ability to specify separate dates for the original publication and the edition that you are citing.
5. Allow papers to be “in press” and it is also necessary to be able to put “s.d.” (sine datum) or “n.d.” (no date) and equivalents in other languages. Great to hear you are working on this.
These have been raised with Development for future iterations of Mendeley.
36 comments
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Lyle
commented
Hi, all,
I encountered this problem today, and I managed a workaround until they fix it:
1. My institution uses Harvard Referencing, so I started with my basic Harvard CSL File (go to View -> Citation Styles -> More Styles). Right click the style you want to customize, then click "edit style". This will bring up Mendeley's Visual CSL Editor.
2. Choose whether you want to save to this CSL file, or create a new one.
3. I rarely use the fields "Revision Number" (variable=number) or "Short Title" (variable=title-short), so these are what I adapted:
Revision number = Original publication date
Short title = alternative text to pub date (such as "forthcoming").4. In the Visual CSL Editor, I chose the "Macro: year-date". As a child of the "if issued" or "else-if issued" field, I added a conditional -> If number -> display the "number" variable.
Edit the affixes as necessary - e.g. I added a preceding space parentheses around the date.
5. Under the parent conditional, I added an else-if condition (in line with the final "else" -> no-date conditional). Else-if the variable "title-short" is present -> text variable "title-short"
6. Go to Style -> Save (or Save As...) and save the style. It will automatically send the and select the custom file in your Mendeley Desktop.
7. Test it by exporting a citation.
A screen shot of this is here:
http://i50.tinypic.com/s42tr9.jpg -
atreiju
commented
Please, I NEED to be able to put things like "n. d." (no date) into the year/date-field!
Several Bibtex/Biblatex-Styles depend on that! Without Mendeley beeing able to do this, I have to MANUALLY edit ALL the entries in the .bib-file!
I can't believe, that this feature was suggested in 2009, and still isn't implemented... :-(
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J
commented
I need to be able to use a range of dates for many papers in my field (entomology). For example, one important publication was interrupted by WWII and needs to be cited as "1937-1954". Also some volumes of some journals are published over a two (or more) year time span.
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Martin C. Jones
commented
*bump*
How about that more flexible date field?
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sdray
commented
In the same spirit, I would vote for transforming the 'Month' field into a string character. (Same problem for year which is numeric and thus does not allow 'in press', 'submitted', etc). The problem is that when you export to BibTex File, the field 'day' is not exported and thus you cannot export a DD/MM/YY. One solution would be to allow string chracters in the 'Month' Field so that you can write '27 june' in this field to export a full date. Moreover, in the current version of Mendeley, there is no way to consider date interval such as '22-27' june (because the day is a numeric and thus didi not allow other characters like '-'). This is problematic if you want to corrrectly reference a conference.
So, I would like to have a more flexible way to deal with dates and I think that it would be better to use characters instead of dates/numeric format.
Moreover, It would be nice if you can publish (1) what are the specificities and requirements for each field and (2) which fields are exactly exported in the BibTex file.
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Michael
commented
Also a problem for people who need to be less specific. When I gather data from a series of yearly reference books, I want to be able to cite (OECD, various years).
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Mattis
commented
@Paul: I guess, that is the best way how to solve this issue. May I ask, how your script looks like since I am a novice in Latex and I would appreciate your help. Replacing '(n.d.)' by '(in press)' is crucial. Thanks in advance!!
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Paul
commented
I second this. For now, I just put 9999 in the year field and run a script over my .bib file that replaces this with "in press" (the script also corrects a number of other BibTeX related shortcomings.
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Marvin Ruppert
commented
Using APA citation style (6th edition), information about unpublished work such as "in press" belongs in brackets after the authors:
Author, A. (in press). Title of the work.
Wouldn't it be an easy step to just allow letters (or maybe just predefined strings "in press", "submitted" and "accepted") in the "year"-field of mendeley?
Right now it's a major annoyance...
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sdray
commented
The possibility to include character strings such as 'in prep', 'in press' or 'submitted' would be welcome (especially for bibtex use). Hope that the field will be more flexible in the future.
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Armin Wagner
commented
Please take a look at the apacite package regarding reprints and translations.
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Niels Van Quaquebeke
commented
Might want to fuse this issue with "additional option for paper status, such as submitted, accepted or in press" http://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-mendeley-feedback/suggestions/889393-additional-option-for-paper-status-such-as-submit?ref=title because the year field is often the field for these other paper statuses
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Anonymous
commented
The need to expand the "year" field to accept text, multiple years, publication years plus year of original writing, etc., are absolutely essential and need to be fixed right away.
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Anonymous
commented
This is also a nuisance when citing new issues of classic works. Generally you would give both the original year and the year of the reprint. For instance: Heidegger (1927|2002).
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Anonymous
commented
This is also a nuisance when citing new issues of classic works. Generally you would give both the original year and the year of the reprint. For instance: Heidegger (1927|2002).
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Dewald Noeth
commented
@KK The problem with that is that the styles differ. Some would put the in press at the end of the author(s) and others would place it where the pages would go.
This is a massive trend that is rising and we need to start adding this to the referencing styles and managers.
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Marcelo
commented
Please guys, this is a very important field, and may not be very time demanding to implement.
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Alex
commented
I think this should be merged with this idea: http://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-mendeley-feedback/suggestions/405215-allow-year-field-to-contain-letters-as-well-as-num?ref=title
I want to be able to have 'Forthcoming' as my year without it being deleted.
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Jan
commented
Besides "In Press" it is also necessary to be able to put "s.d." (sine datum) or "n.d." (no date) and equivalents in other languages. Great to hear you are working on this.
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tal
commented
Robert: yes, it's crucial to be able to say that a paper is "in press".
