On 03/25/2014 11:12 AM, Michael D. Godfrey wrote:
> On 03/24/2014 06:11 PM, Rik wrote:
>> 3/24/14
>>
>> John,
>>
>> We have about 50 citations in the manual to various books, journal, or
>> dissertations. Is there a preferred format for these? If not, I think we
>> should choose one and harmonize. I've been looking at using the IEEE
>> citation style.
>>
>> --Rik
> Rik,
>
> I have had to use the IEEE style quite a lot and I do not like it much.
> Actually, the whole
> package of LaTeX style stuff that you required to use for their
> publications is widely
> (at least around EE at Stanford) viewed as a big headache. Many people
> cannot
> handle it directly and dump it on some grad student. The author initials
> first is
> uncommon and seems nonsensical to me.
>
> The MLA standard looks better and seems to be widely used.
That's interesting. I just did a quick web survey and I didn't see much
MLA usage in computer science. Some Universities have defined a standard,
but often they just say consult your professor for style they want to see.
This page from Dalhousie University
(http://dal.ca.libguides.com/content.php?pid=860&sid=11818#jcxiee) mentions
ACM, APA, and IEEE which is how I got into thinking about IEEE. Maybe ACM
or APA would be better as they both list last name first in the
bibliography and use the last name in the reference.
>
> One thing that I think is important, and IEEE does not allow at all, is
> that the citation
> should give the author name, not just [n]. This can be done by just
> typing the name
> before the \reference, but doing it this way (which the IEEE editors
> refuse to allow) can
> be error prone.
This point might not be so relevant for us. There is only one reference I
saw that was embedded in the text that pointed to the bibliographic
information below. Rather, our references tend to be at the end of a
documentation string and are simply a bibliographic list of works that
would be useful to visit.
>
> There seem to be lots of BibTeX citation styles around. It would good to
> choose one
> of these even though they cannot (I think) be directly used in the Manual
> (or can they?).
>
> Definitely settling one one "correct" way to do this is a very good idea.
>
> Michael
>
>
>