Cite - Copy to Clipboard Order

When I copy a group of citations to clipboard they are surname first. However, they are not in alphabetical order. It would be useful if they were in alphabetical order.

Also, it would also be useful if we had a choice of copying to clipboard as a true citation i.e., author’s first name first, rather than surname first e.g. Colin Jones, ‘The Great Revolution’ (Oxford, 2002). This would allow for copying into footnotes for those of us who don’t use Google Docs. While retaining the option to have Jones, Colin, ‘The Great Revolution’ (Oxford, 2002) as a bibliographical reference as they already are.

The order of citations is determined by the order they are selected.

A simple trick to get them sorted alphabetically is to sort your library by “Author” (see screen shot of the right hand panel) and then select the entries you want to cite from top to bottom.

The request to copy the actual in-text citation instead of the bibliographical reference is a bit tricky For numeric styles like [1], … it does not make much sense, and also for the author-date style it’s also complicated because the actual in-text citation depends on the other citations already present in the document (e.g. first author has the same name and another author must be added to disambiguate correctly, or the same author published two papers in the same year - e.g. 2008a, 2008b). That’s a task that can only be solved efficiently in a word processor.

There is, however, a way to customize citation styles to your need (http://editor.citationstyles.org/about/), e.g. the citation styles “Chicago Manual of Style 16th edition (note)” or “Chicago Manual of Style 16th edition (endnote, no bibliography)” might already work for your use case, or might be a good starting point for customization.