Using Personal Knowbase for Citations

A previous post talked about using Personal Knowbase for Bibliographies. In addition to using the software for listing and annotating bibliographies, you can link your working notes with source articles to create citations.

The general idea is to include information about your sources in the same PK data file as your "working articles" which contain the notes and writing work for your current project. You would have a single PK article for each source and assign it keywords for the topics relevant to that source. Please see the previous post for more ideas on using PK as reference management software.

With your working articles and source articles separated, two options for creating citations by connecting the working articles back to the relevant source article(s) are using keywords and using hypertext links. The file shown in this screen shot uses both methods for demonstration purposes.

Creating Citations with Keywords

The first option for connecting to sources is to make a unique keyword for each source. Then assign that keyword to the source article itself and to all working articles which use that source. Then, when you select that source keyword in the Index Window, the source information and everything related to it will be listed in the Titles column.

This is likely to work well only if the current project has relatively few sources. If your project has hundreds of sources, you would need hundreds of such keywords, and the keywords list could become cumbersome to manage.

If you use Personal Knowbase's Keyword Groups feature and select this method for citing sources, you could create a Keyword Group containing all of the source keywords so that you could easily list these keywords in the Index Window's Index column.

Creating Citations with Hypertext Links

A second option is to use hypertext links (hyperlinks). That is, link each working article to the relevant source articles with hyperlinks from within the text of the working article. In Personal Knowbase, hypertext links can point to URLs, external files, or other articles. In this case, you'd create a citation from the working article as a hyperlink to the corresponding source article.

Hyperlinks in Personal Knowbase can link from any arbitrary text. So you can create citations in whichever format you normally use, then create a link from the citation text to the corresponding source article.

For example, if you use the Vancouver system for citations, you could make a hyperlink from the superscripted reference that would look like this: ^[1]

With a parenthetical referencing system, you could link the citation to the source article by creating a hyperlink from the parenthetical text that would look like this: (Smith, 1985, pp. 58-60)