From temporary citations to formatted document

I can safely say that all of us start writing papers without using bibliographic software. When you first write a research paper or thesis in college, your professor will tell you what citation style you should follow. The most popular ones are APA, Chicago, MLA, Turabian, etc. You have to remember some rules about the style you use. Since some styles have very detailed and complicated rules about how citations and references should be formatted, it can be quite time consuming. It is even worse when you have to cite the same reference later when writing another paper. Since each journal has its own style requirement, it is very likely you have to type the same reference again in another format.

Bibliographic software is built to solve this problem. You enter a reference into your Biblioscape database. When your are ready to cite a reference while writing a paper, you can enter a temporary citation with ID text to uniquely identify it, instead of entering the reference in a formatted form. A temporary citation looks like this: [Smith, John 2001 #341]. Once you are finished writing, you can feed your manuscript into Biblioscape and specify the style you want to use like APA, MLA, etc. Biblioscape will convert temporary citations into formatted ones according to the style you picked. A reference list will also be generated at the end of the manuscript according to the style's specifications. Compared to the traditional way of writing a paper, Biblioscape brings 3 main benefits.

1.	You no longer need to remember some complicated rules when citing references. Biblioscape will do the hard work for you.

2.	In case your paper needs to be submitted to another journal, you can just tell Biblioscape to use another style. All citations and reference lists will be regenerated instantly.

3.	You only need to enter a reference once manually or by importing. The same reference can be cited many times in different papers.

One of the main functions of Biblioscape is to generate citations and bibliographies for your thesis, papers, etc. Biblioscape generates bibliographies according to the rules of scientific journals. To do this, you need to insert a temporary citation tag where a reference needs to be placed (for example: [Smith, J. 1994 #213] or [#smith 1994]).

1.	First, select the references in Biblioscape, then click on menu command “Edit \| Copy Tag”. Then, go to your word processor document and paste it. After you finish writing, save your document in a Rich Text Format (*.rtf) file.

2.	Switch to Biblioscape, click on menu command “Tools \| Format Manuscript”. Then click on the “Browse” button and select the RTF file you want to format.

4.	If you want to publish on the Web, select HTML as the “File Format”, otherwise keep RTF checked.

5.	Press the “Start” button. Biblioscape will convert the tagged document into a formatted document with properly formatted citations and a bibliography.

During the formatting of a paper, Biblioscape extracts the temporary citations in the paper, and searches the database to find records that match each of the citations. If Biblioscape can't find a match, it will insert ((reference not found)) into the place of the temporary citation. If you use natural citation styles as temporary citations, Biblioscape may find more than one record that matches your search text. Biblioscape then prompts you with all the matches, and lets you pick the reference you want.

During the formatting of a paper, Biblioscape will use the format filter that matches the reference type of your temporary citation. If such a match can't be found, Biblioscape will prompt you to use the default format filter to format the reference involved. For example, if you cited a reference of the type “Conference Proceedings”, and “Conference Proceedings” is not defined in the style you selected, you will be presented with the option to format it as a “Journal Article”.

Biblioscape can also format and unformat a HTML document. You should follow the same procedures as described above. Biblioscape will create a hyperlink automatically between in-text citations and its corresponding reference in the bibliography section.

When converting temporary citations to formatted citations and a bibliography, Biblioscape adds hidden text around formatted citations and the bibliography. So if needed, Biblioscape can convert the document back into an unformatted document with temporary citations. Hidden text can cause problems with publishing software used by scholarly journal publishers. Biblioscape offers the option to format a manuscript without adding hidden text. In the "Tools | Options" window "Format Manuscript" tab, check off the box "Support unformat manuscript". Once your paper is accepted by a journal publisher, you may want to turn off the above option and generate a final copy without hidden text.

Tip: Biblioscape can be integrated into Microsoft Word and Corel WordPerfect. This way, users can then generate a formatted document using one click inside their favorite word processor.

Note: Each time Biblioscape formats or unformats a document, it will make a copy of the file it is going to change and save it under a different name with “*backup*” added. If you experience a problem with the Biblioscape formatting, you can always go to the *backup” file to recover the original document.