Brian A. Roberts, Ph.D.
Memorial University of Newfoundland

Occasionally a piece of software arrives for review that really has something to offer. Citation ... is one such program.

Of all the tedious and time consuming and frustrating aspects of writing, dealing with the multitude of formats that various conferences and journals and book publishers demand wins the prize. Each citation style has its own "look and feel" and despite using more or less the same information, each style is unique and demands enormous attention to detail. Although most of us use one style more than others, even with such commonplace styles as APA, now in its 4th (1994) edition, few seem to know more than the basics and are left with searching out the manual to see how government documents are supposed to be entered or old newspaper articles and all other sorts of less frequently used referencing materials. In other formats requested by publishers, I am left to make it up as best I can following the usual short form supplied.

The worst situation is where you have worked on a paper for some time and presented it and are about to send it off somewhere in the style of one journal when you get an invitation to submit a paper for another journal which uses a completely different style. The tedious job of converting APA to MLA for example can take so much time that you might be forgiven if you pass on the offer to make the submission.

My other personal challenge is to get all of the sources I use into a bibliography or reference list. In fact, the challenge goes even further in that I need to purge my reference list of material that didn't make the last edit of the paper.

And the last straw for me comes when I have to re-manufacture a large part of a bibliography for yet another paper when much of the basic list is similar but never the same. Because I write a lot and frequently in a single area as many scholars do, I tend to re-use a large part of my basic bibliographic material that provides the academic framework into which much of my work falls. In fact, I have copied many of the entries so much that I can quote even journal page numbers from memory for a large body of literature.

Citation for WordPerfect for Windows accomplishes all of these tasks for you invisibly from within WordPerfect. When you install Citation, it alters the Tools feature on the programme bar and adds the item Citation. For the technical reader, Citation stores its information in WordPerfect merge files.

You need to build only a single bibliographic file from which Citation will extract the necessary information and build the proper reference lists in the appropriate stylistically correct form. To add an entry for a journal article you simply click on that form and fill in all of the blank boxes. You won't forget to store the page numbers of volume number ever again. How many times have I had to go back to the library to find some obscure article that I forgot or lost the page number for? Each entry is given a code called the "access phrase" which is unique and identifies the cited material used in the body of the text. This can be self-evident such as "Rose 1995" or "Smith cultural paper from Victoria" (although shorter is always better). In any case, each reference must be identified with a unique "access phrase" and suggestions as to the best method are given in the very thorough reference guide which comes with the program. This is actually a very important feature since you won't have to remember exactly what each of Roberts, 1994a, b, c, d, e, f - etc. refer to.

In the body of your text you add entries similar, but not identical, to APA style. A typical entry would look like this -- {Kent 1981: 225}. You can also code and insert actual quotations from your reference material by using the "Notes" data entry form. To do this simply type {Kentdoc1; Kent 1981:225}. This would insert the previously coded quotation followed by the appropriate reference style notation. You may have as many "Access Phrases" within the curly brackets (the "Access Keys") as you need. Citation will replace "Access Keys" in your document with "In Text Citations" and generate references for all the works cited. You can also code "Access Keys" to list bibliographic works you used to prepare a piece but which were not cited directly in the body of the text.

You don't have to remember all of the "Access Phrases" because Citation lets you print out a list from which you can remind yourself as you write.

When you finish the paper, you instruct Citation to generate the finished article in whatever style you choose. MLA, APA, Chicago, etc. and Citation. . . produces your masterpiece on a second document screen. This new document can be saved, printed and submitted as the disk version. The original Citation coded document is saved in case you should need to re-generate the essay in a different publishing style.

When Citation generates the finished paper, it searches through your bibliographic file to find all of the relevant material needed to manufacture the correct style as you have selected.

Never will writing be quite the same. I highly recommend this program to anyone who writes (particularly to students who have multiple professors' wishes to fulfill). It's also inexpensive.

Citation supports about 1000 different styles and is also available as Version 7.0 for Microsoft Word. The company will send you a manual and a Demo version to try for yourself.