Are you talking about a short reference list already inserted in a paper
as a reference list or about a reference list that is being created from
the entire database? Particularly for the latter, I would say it
depends on how much you want to force the users into a single mode of
thinking about the information items in their databases. For example,
say a user knows she has an information item that was written back in
the 1920s or 1930s about a topic (e.g., Heisenberg's uncertainty
principle), but she cannot remember the author's name or enough wording
to pull back the article by title. In that case she would want to
browse a list of information items in the database sorted by date of
publication. It is always better to give the user as much freedom as
possible to change the default.
Martha
Bruce D'Arcus wrote:
cross-posting here ...
I'm working on sorting configuration, but am running into a
fundamental design question:
When dealing with reference lists, is the first field always the sort
key?
For example, in a typical reference list, the creator name will be the
sort key. If there is no creator, there needs to be rules to specify
substitutes. For a book, it might be to substitute the phrase
"Anonymous." For an article, it might be to substitute the periodical
title.
In a cite key style citation class, likewise, it seems the sort key is
the citation key; e.g.:
[doe99] Doe, J. ...
Is this a reliable general rule then? Or should instead the layout
and the sorting be seen as completely separate?
I'm leaning towards a structure like:
<reftype name="article" sort-key="creator"
alternate-sort-key="container-title">
It's possible for me to do some RELAX NG magic and condition the
layout of the following elements based on the sort-key value, but I'm
not sure I should do that or not.
The other issue I've not resolved is how to handle CDATA, though one
solution is to have:
<reftype name="article">
<sort>
<primary>creator</primary>
<secondary type="variable">container-title</secondary>
<!-- "variable" is probably not the right value name, but I can't
think of a better one -->
</sort>
<reftype name="book">
<sort>
<primary>creator</primary>
<secondary type="text">Anonymous</secondary>
</sort>
Bruce
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