The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
RSS feeds: v0.91; v1.0 (RDF); v2.0; Atom.
Previous entry.
9:45am on Wednesday, 13th May, 2026:
Outburst
In Volume I of Designing Virtual Worlds, 2nd edition, I list the reasons why I include citations:
Citations take a lot longer to get right than you might think. There are some papers that are cited dozens or hundreds of times, but when you try to find the source so you can read them (I always read what I cite) it's nigh impossible. The references themselves may be incomplete, omitting key information such as what month of the year some article appeared in in a monthly publication. Sorting all this out takes time. Even adding a new reference to a modern research paper takes a good five or ten minutes, because often you need information that isn't directly presented (ISSN numbers, city of publication names, editor names, ...).
Fortunately, over the years I've written many books and papers, so have a corpus of papers for which I've already done the citation donkey work. These are all stored in Microsoft Word's citation system. It's not bad as it goes, and you can create a bibliography automatically at the end of the work that lists all the papers you've cited in whatever format you want (APA, Chicago, ISO 690, Harvard — not IEEE, though). There are some annoyances, for example the bibliography won't include citations that only appear in footnotes, and it doesn't make a distinction between "This is true (Smith, 2026)" and "Smith (2026) says this is true" — it uses the first format in both cases — but generally it makes life a lot easier.
Unfortunately, although the list of stored citations doesn't have a limit to the number of references in it, when you want to select one to insert into the text then then it does. Word builds a list of all the papers you have made available to the work, so you can choose the one you want. This list is in alphabetical order, but has a maximum length. I have so many papers cited in the book I'm currently working on, Volume II of Designing Virtual Worlds, 2nd edition, that the list cuts off mid-way through W. If the leading author is Waite, their paper will appear in the list, but if it's Wright then they won't.
This means that if I want to cite a new paper by someone called Young, say, it won't appear in the list. Neither would it appear if I copied an existing paper by Young from my global list to the book-specific one. It's in the database (I can edit it, and I can add more references), but it's not in the list of references I can choose from to put in the text. What I have to do to insert the citation is change the author's surname to AAAYoung, so it will appear at the top of the truncated list of papers that I can site, then after I've inserted it, change it back to Young. This is a tiresome way to have to do things, and would go away if Microsoft allowed pull-down lists to be of arbitrary length. The program knows in advance how many elements there will be in the list, so it's not as if it needs to allocate a fixed amount of space and then stop when it's full.
I am aware there are other word-processors out there and assorted citation-management tools, but that's no use to me if my papers list is in Microsoft's format.
The book is due to be completed by the end of 2023, by the way. I may be running a little late with it.
Latest entries.
Archived entries.
About this blog.
Copyright © 2026 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).