Creating a Custom Reference Style

Reference Tracker gives you the ability to create your own custom reference formatting styles with its easy to use style editor.

Styles are created, edited and managed from the Styles Manager window, which you can open by selecting 'Manage Styles...' from the 'Reference Tracker' menu.

stylesmanager

You can create a new style from scratch by clicking on the 'New Style' icon in the window toolbar, or you can modify a copy of an existing style by selecting an existing style from the list on the left, click on 'Duplicate Style' in the toolbar, followed by 'Edit Style'.

The style editor sheet is where you design your style.

editsheet

In the top section of the editor are fields to enter basic information about your style - Name, Description and Creator.

The middle section is where you design the format and layout of the reference information for each of the publication types supported by Reference Tracker. You select the publication type to edit by selecting it from the 'Editing:' popup menu.

editorpubtypepopup

To create the layout for the selected publication types, you drag the items from the 'Available Components' list on the left into the 'Reference Layout' or 'In-Text Citation Layout' field on the right. You can switch between editing the reference or citation layout by clicking the buttons on the right.

tokenviews

The items in blue are representative of the various pieces of information about a reference that would be available, such as Title, Author, Publisher, etc. When Reference Tracker generates a reference list in your style, these components are substituted for the corresponding values in each reference in your document.

The grey 'Free Text' component can be used to insert arbitrary text or punctuation into the layout. To edit the contents of a Free Text component, just double click on it in the Reference Layout field. When you are editing a Free Text component, pressing Enter, Return or Tab on your keyboard will complete the edit. However, if you wish to include a newline or tab character in the Free Text item, hold down the Option key then press Enter, Return or Tab. To make clear that a Free Text component includes whitespace characters such as spaces, tabs and newlines, these are displayed as dots, arrows and paragraph markers respectively.

All the component items in your reference layout can have conditions attached to them, meaning they will only be included in a formatted reference if all the conditions are met. For example You could create a Free Text component with the text "Unknown Author" to be included if a reference being formatted has no Author value. In this case the "Unknown Author" text component would be conditional on the Author value not existing. If the author value does exist, the alternate text would not be included.

To add conditions to a component item, select it in the Reference Layout field, then click the checkbox underneath labelled "Include this component if". The conditions editor becomes enabled and you can select the other component that this one is conditional on, and whether the condition is the other component existing or not existing. To add multiple conditions, click on the plus button on the left.

conditionseditor

As you build your reference layout, a preview is generated in the 'Preview and Indentation' field at the bottom of the window. If your reference style requires specific paragraph indentation, you can specify it by adjusting the rulers above the preview.

stylepreview

The final section in the editor sheet contains options for handling author names. You can choose to use only authors surnames when creating citations, and you can specify an maximum number of author names to include in a citation before replacing them with 'et al.' Some reference styles require that references to multiple works by the same author are listed sequentially, and that only the first lists the author's name. The subsequent works have the author's name replaced by a short sequence of characters such as a dash or hyphen. If this is the case for your style, select this option and type in the characters that are substituted for the author's name.

consecauthorfield