Thanks so much for this report. It’s really helpful to see how this work with a proofreader worked out for you and where the problems where.
A few random thoughts;
- I think we are pretty good already. Just sharing a link of a Google document and as a proofreader you have everything to modify and edit the citations (this will get even better with our free add-on). Imagine they would have never used EndNote and you would have to set up and explain a sane workflow with Word and EndNote.
- The linking is a bug. It should open only the references in the citation. We are aware of that and will fix that.
- It’s technically not possible to avoid someone editing a link (it might be if she or he has the addon-enabled but even there it’s tricky to implement)
- Regarding the data. I think it’s the right thing to save all data available and CSL should figure out how to format the citations. I’m not sure why this does not work for publishers of journals in Chicago. We have not heard any complaints but I’m not really familiar with that.
- If you see constantly books being not imported correctly let us know. @andreas can have a look at it and maybe there is a generic fix. I’ve said this before we do lots of magic to get journal data right but our algorithm is not as sophisticated for books yet. But we don’t get many complaints. That either means it’s not that bad or users just accept that data needs to be manually improved. We don’t really want accept that except in cases where it’s really not possible.