Documentation
Publicon
User Guide
Advanced Features
Handling References
Customizing the Bibliography
Customizing the Bibliography
Reference Templates
The style of citations and the bibliography is controlled by reference templates. Each reference template is a cell of style "ReferenceTemplate" located in the Backmatter:References:Reference Templates section of the style sheet.
There is a different reference template for each major reference type, such as Book, Article, Periodical, or Thesis. In addition, there are other reference templates that control global properties of the bibliography, such as the criterion used to sort the entries or the style of labels placed at the beginning of each entry.
The reference template for each reference type specifies the type, order, and style of the different pieces of data composing the bibliography entry, such as the author's name, the title of the book or journal, and the date of publication. You can change the default formatting for any reference type by editing the appropriate reference template in the style sheet. You can also define new reference types by creating new reference templates.
For example, here is a typical reference template from the BioMedCentral style sheet.
Periodical:<Author>: <Title>. <JournalTitle>, <Year>, <JournalVolume>:<FirstPage>-<LastPage>.
The first word in the template specifies the type of reference to which the template applies, which in this case is Periodical. The reference type name is followed by a colon which, in turn, is followed by a statement that defines the structure and style of the bibliography entry. This statement consists of a set of keywords surrounded by angled brackets, such as <Author>, <Title>, <JournalTitle>, <Year>, and so on.
Each of these keywords corresponds to a specific piece of data in the reference entry in the database. For example, <Year> represents the data found in the Year field of any reference entry whose RefType is Periodical. The style in which this piece of data is formatted is determined by a style definition cell in the style sheet.
Any text outside the angled brackets is inserted literally into the bibliography entry. This provides a way to insert blank space, parentheses, punctuation marks, and so on between the different parts of the bibliography entry.
When you create a bibliography for a document formatted according to the BioMedCentral style sheet, the entry for a Periodical reference might appear as follows.
1. Sanderfoot AA, Raikhel N: The specificity of vesicle trafficking: coat proteins and SNAREs. Plant Cell, 1999, 11:629-642.
Notice the correspondence between this bibliography entry and its earlier reference template. The order in which different pieces of data appear in the entry, as well as the punctuation and white space separating the data, are all determined by the reference template.
Publicon automatically inserts the serial number at the beginning of the reference entry, based on the order in which the citation for this reference occurs in the main document.
