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Re: Citing electronic articles and the "Date accessed" problem
| Re: Citing electronic articles and the "Date accessed" problem |
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Author: Monica Barratt
Posted: Fri, 19 Jan 2007 16:59:37 -0500
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I think you are absolutely right. I have used Endnote long enough to
create my own field edits for reference styles I commonly use to enable
them to be either sourced in print or online. For example, I have edited
the Report style as - almost always these days - I have sourced the
report online.
This is a fix which isn't perfect, and I have often wondered why this
logic of having both online/print for all conceivable types of reference
is not implemented in Endnote already. I hope this is considered for
future versions!
Regards
Monica
Monica Barratt
PhD Student
National Drug Research Institute
Curtin University of Technology
PO Box 8016
Camberwell North Vic. 3124
AUSTRALIA
+61 407 778 938
monica.barratt at postgrad.curtin.edu.au
On 18/01/07, />
wrote:
I have been a strong advocate of EndNote for some years now but I am
finding that it is increasingly irrelevant to most of my students. One
of the reasons for this is that it has not handled well the increasing
use of new formats. A prime example is the electronic article which
comes in a variety of manifestations * including page images of printed
originals from publisher sites, web versions of journals, magazines and
newspapers and web-only publications.
EndNote 8 and subsequent versions have a new reference type of
Electronic Article which resolves some of the problems with citing this
material. However due to the illogical way EndNote records Date of
access, it can only be used for certain types of articles.
EndNote now deals with this in 3 different ways. For Electronic Sources
(which includes websites with a single title) it uses the Generic Volume
field to denote the Access year and the Issue field to denote Access
month and day. Splitting the access year from the rest of the date
allows for differing treatments of these 2 elements as required by
different styles. For most other reference types EndNote has uses a new
Generic Access Date field. As a single field it requires the writer to
enter data in the format required by the reference style, which
eliminates one of the reasons for using EndNote in the first place.
But the craziest thing is that for most electronic formats (electronic
article, electronic book, online database, online multimedia etc) it
uses the Generic Date field. This is the field which is required to
indicate day and month of publication of newspapers, magazines and those
journals (such as Harvard Business Review) which are generally
designated by date rather than volume and issue. This means that the
Electronic article reference type cannot be used for these publications.
A similar situation applies to dated podcasts, tv programs via the web
etc.
Why, oh why didn't EndNote create 2 new fields for Access Year and
Access Date (rather than just the one), and then use those consistently
for all reference types?
I think RefWorks, despite its other limitations, deals with this issue
much more logically by offering either print ( i.e. local) and
electronic
(online) manifestations for any reference type, thus recognising that
almost any type of material can be now be accessed via the web.
What do other EndNote users think?
John Terrell
Lecturer in Information Management
School of Business Information Technology RMIT University Melbourne,
Australia
/>
http://www.rmit.edu.au
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| Re: Citing electronic articles and the "Date accessed" problem |
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Author: Alex
Posted: Fri, 19 Jan 2007 17:07:09 -0500
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On Jan 17, 2007, at 14:52, wrote:
> [...] the illogical way EndNote records Date of access [...]
Most of the references I use are not available on-line, so I don't have
the experience to judge if your criticism is apposite or not. However, I
have two points: (1) EN doesn't record the "Date of Access"; (2) I don't
find EN default structure illogical -- but maybe its logic does not fit
your needs; (3) it appears to me that you assume the EN reference type
structure is cast in stone -- I'm not sure I understand what prevents
you from modifying reference types and output styles to fit your needs.
> But the craziest thing is that for most electronic formats (electronic
> article, electronic book, online database, online multimedia etc) it
> uses the Generic Date field. This is the field which is required to
> indicate day and month of publication of newspapers, magazines and
> those journals (such as Harvard Business Review) which are generally
> designated by date rather than volume and issue. This means that the
> Electronic article reference type cannot be used for these
> publications.
Nor is it supposed to. According to the manual:
"If you are citing a journal article that appears both online and in
print, most style guides prefer that you use the print information and
cite it as a regular journal article."
> Why, oh why didn't EndNote create 2 new fields for Access Year and
> Access Date (rather than just the one), and then use those
> consistently for all reference types?
I don't know enough to argue whether or not a separate "Access Year"
and "Access Date" fields are required (btw, isn't the year part of the
date?); nor do I know enough about EN's database engine to judge how
difficult it would have been to add two more fields instead of one. But
I notice that there exists a field labelled "Access Date", plus no less
than 7 custom fields. The "Access Date" field is not enabled by default
for the 5 on-line reference types, but customising reference types to
enable it (or any of the custom fields) is trivial (see User's Guide,
ch. 14). It is equally trivial to make the customised RefTypeTable.xml
available to one's students. The output style(s) employed by the
students would require minor changes to use this field; but, again, this
should pose no problem.
So why not customise to your requirements? Is there something I'm
missing?
(That is not to say that I find EN's database engine very good, or even
just good. There are many problems with it -- lack of relational
capabilities, for one -- but, within its limitations, your problem seems
relatively easy to handle.)
<0x0192>
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