Scrivener for Windows versus Writing outliner add-in for MS Word

Posted by Dr Andus
Nov 8, 2011 at 10:13 PM

Mitchell Kastner wrote:
>Thanks,
> >I set up Srivener to invoke Mendeley, and when I copied a citation from
>Mendeley—-btw I could have set up Scrivener to start any exe file; it’s not partial to
>bib/cit software, the cite was pasted into Scrivener as plain test: “Levett, L. M., &
>Kovera, M. B. (2008, August). The effectiveness of opposing expert witnesses for
>educating jurors about unreliable expert evidence. Law and human behavior.
>doi:10.1007/s10979-007-9113-9.” When I cite to this article again in the same
>Scrivener doc or another and when I compile the docs to an RTF file, my huge concern is
>how will Word handle subsequent citations to the same article. I.e., unless the
>subsequent cites to the same article are converted to short cites—-”(Levett &
>Kovera, 2008, p.2)” Scrivener would continue to be unacceptable to me. (I surmise
>from Dr. Andres previous post that Endnote, which is not in my budget, would handle the
>conversion to short citations seemlessly through the MS Word plug-in.)

Mitchell, I don’t have the time to check this for you in Mendeley but I assume that it also has a Word add-on for citations and it should work very similarly to EndNote. From your description it sounds that you may not be copying the citation in the correct format. You would need to copy it as Mendeley code (if possible).

E.g. in EndNote, when I right-click on a citation, there are two options for copying: 1) Copy and 2) Copy Formatted. It sounds like you are using the equivalent of ‘Copy Formatted’, which copies the whole citation as text. E.g.

Bell, D. (1973). The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin

However, that’s not what you want. You want to copy and paste the raw code for the citation, which looks something like this: {Bell, 1973 #7}

As long as all the citations are copied and pasted into Scrivener as raw code (EndNote etc.), when you export it as RTF and open it in Word, the given Word add-on will recognise the raw code. Then there will be an option to format it into proper looking citations and bibliographies, as defined by the style in your bibliographic manager.

So I don’t see any problem there with handling subsequent citations, as long as they are all in the raw code format. Of course if you want to re-import the same document into Scrivener to continue working on it, then you would first need to re-convert it into the raw code format (which is an option e.g. in the EndNote add-on in Word), then import it. I assume all other desktop bibliographic managers must work according to a similar principle.