Does google docs remember the citation style?

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Hi guys,

First, thanks, I’m super impressed with the google docs add-on. I’ve just used it to finish a paper with a colleague who uses Word. We mostly worked in Word, but then I fixed up the references in google docs. here was our workflow.

  1. Edit file.doc in Word. Don’t touch the references section though.

  2. Import file.doc into Google docs. Set the citation style to “Journal of XYZ” Add references, and then generate bibliography.

  3. Export from google docs back into a doc file.

  4. Go back to step 1 until ready to submit.

I was amazed that the references inserted in step 2 survived this “washing” through a doc file and back into google docs. Our manuscripts are quite straightforward, but still I was impressed.

The only wrinkle I found though was that when going back to step 2, I had to reset the citation style each time to “Journal of XYZ.” The default citation style (Journal of Neuroscience) I think is the same as my Paperpile.com app. Does that sound familiar? If it is, is there any neat way of the citation style being stored in the doc somewhere?

Thanks, Stephen

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The citation style is stored with the document. However, if you start a new document the default style is used. I guess that was what you were doing in step 2 every time, right?

We took care that you can copy citations around between Google Docs and also between Word and Google Docs. This information is stored in the URL. However, I can’t think of a simple way when copying citations to a new document would set the citation style. We would need some book-keeping behind the scenes and it’s not easy to decide if copying a citation to another document should update the citation style or if it should keep the existing one.

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thanks Stefan. Yes, I was creating a new google doc each time. Its not a big deal – I am still amazed that the citations were preserved as I moved between gdoc and word.

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Stephen,

you can create a template under https://drive.google.com/templates?view=author and create new docs from this template. i guess using this standard feature would be the most useful in this case.