If you want what it does – super. But only then.

Hi there,

Sorry to hear that you’ve had some frustrations with the plugin! Hopefully this (long-winded) response will be able to clear up any of the confusions that you have.

Allow me to tackle each of your concerns, one at a time.

BUT: you are cought to use this tool to use ist very exactly the way it thinks you do have to work.
For my concern I dont like anything that tells me how I do have to work.

This sounds like something I’d say! I can totally understand the frustrations that can manifest when using a tool that doesn’t agree with my own personal workflow. However, specifically in the case of this plugin, the opinionated nature is a necessary evil. Here’s why:

In order for the plugin to maintain compliant with each individual citation style, it must be opinionated. This ensures that all of your posts are uniform and standardized to your particular citation style. For example, if you are using AMA format, then by definition your inline citations must be numbered in order of use in the document. If you are using APA format, then, by definition, your inline citations must be ordered by the primary author’s last name, using the date as a tiebreaker. Because each individual citation style has slightly different implementation details, the only reasonable way of managing those details is by having your CPU hold that information in memory and concern itself with how your citations are ordered. Because you (the writer) do not have to concern yourself with those grainy details, more time can be spent composing your article.

You aren’t allowed to change footnotes. (I dind’t find a way…)
Once you’ve put in manually a text entry to the footnote database, you cant edit this anymore. Or ?

You are ~80% correct here. The key difference with ABT and the other plugins that are available for managing citations is that ABT is much leaner. Individual citations are not saved to your database. This was one of my main reasons for creating this plugin in the first place. Most of the other plugins that exist gum up the wordpress database with so much unnecessary garbage that I couldn’t find it within myself to consider those a reasonable solution.

I’d be happy to discuss the nitty gritty implementation details of this plugin if you’d like, but I’ll stop there for now since that’s outside the scope of your question.

You are able to edit citations once they are placed in the document. You can find the details for how to do that described in detail here.

Free footnotes aren’t allowed. (I dind’t find a way…)

Free footnotes are most definitely allowed. The can be inserted by choosing the “Generic (note)” type in the manual citation editor.

You may put in “free” footnotes – but you have to know it all, and in the moment. Either you know everything, just in time – forename, surname, Year, several Infos abut site, title and and and – or you are noct allowed to generate e databaseentry for a footnote.

The definition of a credible citation is one that contains all the required information for the reader to be able to find it. A citation without the important identifying information is uncredible. That’s why I actively chose to enforce minimums for manually entered citations.

Having said that, you may still circumvent this by choosing the “Generic (note)” type and typing in whatever you’d like.

Additionally, for all citation types, you can circumvent the requirement of author names by deleting that field by clicking the “x” button located to the right of the field.

Suggestions:

This tool could rock the acadamic working, if

1. free footnotes were allowed (just text the way I want, with or without links)
2. database entry could be startet with part of the information and edited later on
3. it could be used just as a free research tool for database searches (pubmed, isbn, whatever) and the generated footnote-text could be inserted in the textfield (and not only as a footnote); this would make it possible to work just the way you want, and, if you like, combine acadamic search with other footnotetools (I prefere footnotes, because I do see the footnotecontent in the text then – and I can change whatever and whenever I want, and I can copy the text, and I do have control, where the footnotes shall be placed…)

1. This feature exists already (see above).
2. I think my answer above touches on this pretty well. If not, please reach out to me and I’ll walk you through it personally.
3. This also is possble. I call the one-off generated reference fields “Static Publication Lists”. You can read about those here.

Thanks so much for the feedback. I hope I was able to clear up any misunderstandings that you might have had. If so, please consider adjusting your rating of the plugin as the WordPress rating system is the only motivation that I have for developing this plugin (I make no money for this).

Please feel free to contact me with any further questions or suggestions. Both of those can be posted here.

Thanks again,
Derek P Sifford

Dear Derek,

thank you very very much for your detailed answer.
I instantly tried your suggestions. This is what I found.

Free notes:
You are right: in the menu of “add manually” ist is possible to change the citation style. I didn’t see this. Suggestion: a small triangle at the right side of te citation style bar would show the user, that this is a dropdown.

In free notes I couldn’t manage to put in links to a part of the note text. Do you have a suggestion for this ?

I understand, that the individaual citations I put in ABT are not saved in a database. So this makes clear, why they can’t be edited later.
Suggestion: I would really appreciate, if I could edit everything later, when its time. In manualy notes I can make a mistake – it would be nice to be able to correct this.
I really mean it: I would love to pay for your software, if I could use it the way I describe…

You are very right, that a correct citation needs all information, and if information is missing, the citation will not be complete and then the work will be incorrect. But a correct text is the final goal. At the moment we are talking about the way to reach this.
When I’m writig a text, I am following an idea. This ist what is really important: getting the idea done. Filling the whole citation in this moment keeps me from following my idea – I just want to pin what I do know about a citation at the moment, as a reminder – and go on with my idea.

How abput this:
If citations were kept in a database, not yet completed entries could be marked with a colour in the list, so I can see, that I would have to go in there again, and manage this later.

If citations were in the database this would be a step towards the additional ability, to put the footnotes not at the end of this actual page, but in an extra page where all citations of al pages are shown.
I am writing about a neurological problem. I do write about this in several pages. And on every new site I do need several citations I had already looked up yet on another site of my text – and now I have to look them up again.
If all citations were shown in one database for all texts of this domain, I could pick out if my databaseentries what I had put in before instead of lokking for this again and again.

It would be great to have one big citation site on the domain project instead of citations on every site which repeat themselves with different numbers. I think it is annoying fo users, to read a text and find one cotation as number 4 here, as number 33 there and number 68 in another page of the domain.

I understood, that you explained, it would be possible, to put in citations in the middle of text, which I looked up woth ABT, so ABT could just be used as a research tool and the footnotes could be managed in another tool by grabbing the text output of ABT. I folowed yyour link but I couldn’t find this. Could you help me again ?

Thank you very very much for your great software. I was really astonished about the feature of getting defined sitations just by searching in a database. This is so very coool !
I would be pleased so very much to find a way to integrate this in my daily research work.

Best regards

Ulrich

(sorry for my poor english)

• This reply was modified 8 years ago by ulrichb.

I appreciate the feedback, Ulrich! It’s helpful to have outside perspectives and to get to know how users would like to utilize the software. Very helpful.

Again, allow me to answer your questions in order:

I didn’t see this. Suggestion: a small triangle at the right side of te citation style bar would show the user, that this is a dropdown.

A small triangle should already exist there. So this is news to me. What browser are you using? Please file this issue here: https://github.com/dsifford/academic-bloggers-toolkit/issues

In free notes I couldn’t manage to put in links to a part of the note text. Do you have a suggestion for this?

Raw links are converted to clickable urls for outside sources if you paste them in the notes field. However, there is not a way to create an anchor link to some place else in the document. It really sounds like what you’re looking for is a plugin that will allow you to create small footnotes to contain afterthoughts, extra information, or a personal comment about what you’re writing about.

While I do understand that many writers like to have that sort of thing available to them, at the present moment, that’s not the goal of the plugin. That said, feel free to add your suggestion to the issues page of the plugin github repository and I might be able to look into this more in the future. (adding this feature–the right way–would take much more work than I think most would anticipate).

I would really appreciate, if I could edit everything later, when its time. In manualy notes I can make a mistake – it would be nice to be able to correct this.

Filling the whole citation in this moment keeps me from following my idea – I just want to pin what I do know about a citation at the moment, as a reminder – and go on with my idea.

I am writing about a neurological problem. I do write about this in several pages. And on every new site I do need several citations I had already looked up yet on another site of my text – and now I have to look them up again.

To me, this sounds like your problem is extending beyond the bounds of WordPress. In my humble opionion, if your goal is to keep a repository of all your research, the only acceptable way to do that would be to use software specifically designed to manage references. WordPress does not fit into that category.

I personally would recommend a free reference manager called Zotero. Other options include Mendeley, Endnote, Papers 3, or ReadCube. This should be mandatory for any researcher. Storing your research in WordPress is a dangerous move. If you have a server failure, all of your research will be destoyed. Storing it in the cloud is the only way to prevent that. While you are composing your post, you can then keep your reference manager open in the background and use it to create collections/notes for the post that you’re writing.

With that said, this plugin pairs with any of those mentioned reference managers. All you need to do to get your research from there into the post you’re working on is export a .RIS file and import it. All of your citations will then be available to you.

I am firm about not storing references in the database.

It would be great to have one big citation site on the domain project instead of citations on every site which repeat themselves with different numbers. I think it is annoying fo users, to read a text and find one cotation as number 4 here, as number 33 there and number 68 in another page of the domain.

I respectfully disagree. In order for research to be transparent, the references from the citations must be attached to the document in which they are being referenced. Adding a layer of complexity by keeping references in a detached state is an antipattern. You should not be doing this.

Additionally, you will be doing the researchers a disservice by not including full citations to their work on every article that you write. If you keep all your references in a single location, services like Altmetric.com will only count those as being cited one time. I urge you to not do this.

I understood, that you explained, it would be possible, to put in citations in the middle of text, which I looked up woth ABT, so ABT could just be used as a research tool and the footnotes could be managed in another tool by grabbing the text output of ABT. I folowed yyour link but I couldn’t find this. Could you help me again ?

Assuming you have citations loaded on your reference list in either the “Cited” or “Uncited” column, all you need to do to create a static publication list is select the references that you’d like to include, click the “Open menu” button to access the dropdown menu, and then choose “Insert Static Publication List”. Here’s another link for reference in the event the last one did not work: https://github.com/dsifford/academic-bloggers-toolkit/wiki#static-publication-lists.

(sorry for my poor english)

If English is your second language, and a translated version of the plugin does not exist yet in your language, please consider translating the plugin into your language. This will be a big help to others whos first language is the same as yours.

Thank you again for the feedback. In the future, can you direct all further correspondance to the ? I’ll be much more responsive there. You are also welcome to contact me by email.

Thanks so much,
Derek P Sifford

Wordpress won’t let me send my response. Please file an issue in the github repo and I’ll respond to you there. https://github.com/dsifford/academic-bloggers-toolkit

Actually, here you go: I posted my response here: https://gist.github.com/dsifford/249c6e7371dc2bfd007c4af7e1ef84ab

WordPress won’t let me send my response.

Your huge reply hit the spam filter and then you made it worse by reposting the same thing 7 times.

*Drinks coffee*

Next time post once and wait. Someone will clear the spam queue. ??

The overall UX of this forum is horrendous. This wouldn’t even be acceptable in 1996. This is hardly the user’s fault. Posting once wouldn’t be a problem if we were given some type of visual confirmation that a post was pending.

**Drinks coffee**

Dear Derek,

sorry for beeing off some days.
I tried to contact you by email, but the link doesn’t work. It might bee easier to talk about this, so I would call you, if you want. Would be very interestig… Just send me your contact data at [email protected].

Best regards

Ulrich

My apologies for the broken link, Ulrich.

My email address is [email protected].