Shabash Merops

Citations

Citations can be presented in a variety of ways by an author. Merops can identify and standardize these to produce a consistent document that conforms to your preferred style.

Name–date system

Merops can identify and standardize the sequence and punctuation of name–date citations. This example enforces a chronological sequence and applying a predefined style between citations:

• (Archer, 2000, Smith, 1990, Smith 1991 a) → (Smith 1990, 1991a; Archer 2000)

Numerical system

Merops can standardize the formatting, position and punctuation of numerical citations:

• Smith [23, 24, 25, 30]. → Smith.^23–25,30

Exception handling

Merops uses advanced pattern recognition, with comprehensive exclusion algorithms to ensure expressions like He²⁺, 10 m², and χ² are not misidentified as citations.

Cross-checking

Merops automatically cross-checks citations against bibliographic lists.

Variability of citations

Name–date citations can be presented in one of a variety of ways by an author. Merops identifies all potential discrepancies including:

• authors missing (e.g. Smith 1990 should be Smith & Jones 1990)
• too many authors (e.g. Smith & Jones 1990 should be Smith 1990)
• one of the authors is misspelt (e.g. Smit 1990 should be Smith 1990)
• accented character mismatch (e.g. Pean 1990 should be Péan 1990)
• the year has been miskeyed (e.g. Smith 1990 should be Smith 1991)
• surname prefix missing (e.g. Smidt 1990 should be van Smidt 1990)
• acronym mismatch (WHO 1990 vs. World Health Organization 1990)
• ‘in press’ matches current year (Smith, in press should be Smith 2003)

Merops can be set up to correct these automatically, to prompt the user to confirm, or to query the author.

Missing citations/references

Merops can alert the user when a citation is found with no matching reference, or vice versa.

Numerical citations sequence

Merops can alert the user when numerical citations are out of sequence.

Reference lists

Merops uses massive dictionaries of surnames, organization names, publisher names, journal names etc. In combination with intelligent pattern recognition to identify all components of a reference.

Merops can then standardizes every aspect of these components, including formatting, punctuation and sequence.

Merops can also alert missing or unidentified references parts.

Some advanced features include:

• identifying and removing paragraph breaks within entries
• large author lists truncated to, say, six authors plus et al.
• expansion/abbreviation of journal titles  (e.g. Br Med J ↔ British Medical Journal)
• elision or explosion of page ranges (e.g. 123–126 ↔ 123–6)

Compare these before and after examples:

[1] YANG, L.R. JNR. , Y. SHEN, R.B. LI, L. F. LUE, C. FINCH, & J. ROGERS. “Estrogen Enhances Uptake of Amyloid ß-Protein by Microglia Derived from the Human Cortex”. Journal of Neurochemistry 2000:75;1447-1454

1.    Yang, LR, Jr, et al. (2000) Estrogen enhances uptake of amyloid β-protein by microglia derived from the human cortex. J. Neurochem. 75, 1447–54.

Here, amendments, based around a style template, have been made to every part of this reference automatically, potentially saving hours of work on lengthy texts.

Comprehensive

Merops can standardize all kinds of references, including journal, book, thesis, and Web references.

Legal references

Merops applies national standard conventions for the presentation of legal citations.

Standards covered:

• The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation
• AALL Universal Citation Guide (Version 2.1)
• The ALWD Citation Manual
• OSCOLA 2002

Automatic linking to external bibliographic resources

Merops interrogates bibliographic databases to add external hyperlinks to references.

This can save on downstream processing costs and adds immediate value and functionality.

Databases

Merops queries CrossRef and PubMed, and can be set up to interrogate other systems that have ‘resolver’ based querying.