Cite a reference

The following are a few important things to know about citing references when writing papers.

The purpose of temporary citations is for Biblioscape to determine which record to use during the formatting of the paper. If you include reference ID in the temporary citation instead of using natural citation, you can change the author year before the pound sign “#” to any text your want. Since the reference ID is enough to determine which record to use, you can add any text before it. For example:

If you have more than one Biblioscape database, make sure all the citations in each paper come from the same database. When Biblioscape formats your paper, it will only search for records in the currently opened database.

Biblioscape assigns a unique record ID to each reference as it is added to your database. These reference IDs could appear in your temporary citation to tell Biblioscape which record to use. You need to keep the following points in mind:

•	Reference ID is assigned sequentially to each reference that is added to a database.

•	The reference ID is never reused or reassigned within the same database. When you delete a record in database, that ID will never be used again in that database.

•	If the same reference appears in two different databases, the reference ID will be different. Therefore, if you cite temporary citations from one database and format your paper with another database, it will result in error, even if all the records cited are available in both databases.

If you have to keep two databases, we recommend you use natural citations that do not use the reference ID to identify a record. This will make your temporary citations database independent.

While formatting a document, Different citations by the same author in the same year will be differentiated by adding “a”, “b”, “c”, etc. at the end of the citation. For example, "Smith, 1997a" and "Smith, 1997b".

If you delete a record in your database after you have cited it in a paper, next time you format that paper, Biblioscape will not be able to find that record if the reference ID is used for a temporary citation. Even when you add that record again into the database, another ID will be assigned to it. Therefore, you have to update your temporary citation with the new reference ID. This is another reason we recommend using natural citation.

If you work on a paper using more than one computer, you should always use natural citation. Then, you don't need to worry about the reference ID in temporary citations. Otherwise, you have to always use the same database on different computers. The best way to do this is to zip the database into a floppy disk with WinZip.

Warning: Text inside temporary citations can not be re-arranged by using drag-and-drop. Drag-and-drop operations inside temporary citations will make Biblioscape unable to format the document properly.