Journals

The Journals macro is designed to make it easier to correct journal titles in references. The Journals macro is governed by a Manager, shown here.

Unlike earlier versions of EditTools, the Journals macro supports any journal name style — including AMA, Chicago, APA, Bluebook, MLA, CSE, and publisher house style. It is fully customizable and you create the individual dataset.

Adding Journal Titles

Adding journal titles to the Journals dataset is easy. It is done via the Journals Manager. There are two options for adding a title: First, to add the correct title and second, to add an incorrect title that should be changed to a correct title.

To add a correct title, simply enter the title in the Add Journal field as shown below and click Add. This will add the title to the dataset.

To add an incorrect title that should be changed to a correct title, enter the incorrect form — that is, misspelled, as in Lousiiana Law Review, or in incorrect form, as in Louisiana Law Review rather than La. L. Rev. — in the Add Journal field and the correct form in the Always correct journal field, as shown below. Click Add to add the information to the dataset.

When you add an incorrect and correct form, two entries are made into the dataset, as shown below. The first entry tells the program to change the incorrect instance to the correct form; the second, tells the program what the correct form is so it knows what to highlight.

Running the Journals Macro

To run the Journals program, select Journals from the Never Spell Word menu in EditTools. Clicking Journals brings up the dialog box shown below where you tell the program which style to apply to journal titles. For our example, we will choose Legal style we have been using. [NOTES: (1) If you have not moved the list of references to a file separate from the main text, it is important that you run the Language macro before you run the Journals macro. See the Language macro information for further details. (2) If you have not moved the list of references to a file separate from the main text, it is important that you add the refs bookmark (spelled exactly as refs) to the line preceding the first reference, usually the title line. This marks the beginning of the section for the macro. It is recommended, however, that you temporarily move the references to their own file when running the macro; if you do, it is unnecessary to add the refs bookmark.]

Visual Cues Aid Reference Editing

If the journal title is in the dataset and is correct, it is highlighted in green (e.g., Ohio St. L.J. above). If it is incorrect and in the dataset, the incorrect version is replaced with the correct version with track changes on (e.g., Oregon Law Review changed to Or. L. Rev. above) — no change is made without track changes on regardless of whether you have set it on or off. You can always see what change has been made. Finally, if the journal title is not in the dataset, it is left alone, that is, it is not highlighted (e.g., McGill Law Journal above).

This speeds reference editing as you can visually see which titles are correct, which have been corrected, and which you need to check (unhighlighted titles). You build your dataset by adding the unhighlighted titles to it via the Journals Manager, including misspelling and author variations. As your dataset grows, there are fewer titles that need to be checked. Every variation for a title that you add to the dataset will save you a lot of time and effort with future documents.