Bibliographies

This tutorial has been contributed by Don Peterson

Open Office Writer contains a built-in database that can keep track of bibliography entries. Thus, you can enter a reference source's data once, then refer to it in future documents.

Adding a bibliographic entry

Use Tools > Bibliography Database to bring up the database window. You should see something like the following picture:

Click on the yellow star in the column buttons within the red ellipse (you may have to scroll to see the yellow star). This adds a new entry to the database. Type in the relevant fields for the reference in the boxes below the table. Choose a meaningful short name, as you'll use it to identify and enter bibliographic references in later documents.

Add other entries as appropriate. For the above book, I entered the short name, author, title, publisher, year, and ISBN. When you're finished, you can close the window.

Inserting a bibliographic reference

To insert a bibliographic reference in your document at the cursor, use Insert > Indexes and Tables > Bibliography Entry... .

You'll see a window like the following:

In the selection box, select the short name of the reference you want to make an entry for, then click on Insert. You'll see the short name in your document in square brackets, such as [ABOK1944].

Constructing a bibliography

Choose Insert > Indexes and Tables > Indexes and Tables... . You'll see the following dialog:

In the Type selection box, select Bibliography:

If you leave the "Protected against manual changes" box checked, you won't be able to edit the entries in the resulting bibliography, nor will you be able to update the bibliography if you've added more bibliography entries to the document. If you press the OK key now, here's an example of what you'll get (there's one entry, since I referenced one bibliographic entry in this document):

This will be inserted as a table. The default presentation of the entries will probably not be to your liking. Use the Entries tab in the above dialog to change how the entry is displayed. Right click anywhere in the bibliography table and select Edit Index/Table, then click on the Entries tab. You'll see:

To the right of Structure, you'll see three buttons labelled Au (for author), Ti (for title), and Ye (for year). These are the fields that are displayed in the bibliography. The white spaces between the entries are blank, indicating that there will be no characters separating the fields. Let's change our bibliography format to the following:

1. The first field should be the short name in square brackets.

2. A tab character should be next.

3. The author's name is next, followed by a comma.

4. The book's title will be enclosed in double quotes and followed by a comma.

5. The publisher will be next, followed by a comma.

6. The date comes next.

7. There will be two spaces, then the ISBN number if it is present.

This dialog is complicated and confusing, so you may have to open it a number of times, make a change, then see if you're getting what you want. I'll go through the steps for changing the ABOK1944 entry (the only one in the above table) to the presentation format we want.

1. Right click anywhere in the bibliography table and select Edit Index/Table, then click on the Entries tab.

2. For Type, select Book.

3. In the selection box under the word Structure, select Short name. Click in the white space next to the left arrow and click the Insert button. This will result in the following (I've unchecked the Preview checkbox to make the picture less cluttered):

You can see the Sh button has been added, which indicates the Short name field.

4. Click in the white space between the Sh and Au button, then click on the Tab stop button. This will result in a button named T (indicating a tab) between the two fields.

5. Click in the white space to the left of Sh, then type the [ character (left square bracket). Click in the white space to the right of Sh, then type the ] character (right square bracket). You should now see

   

6. Click in the white space after Au and type in the characters , " (comma, space, and double quote).

7. Click in the white space after Ti, select the field Publisher in the selection box below the word "Structure", then click on the Insert button. You'll see a Pu button appear.

8. Click in the white space after Ti and type in the characters ", (double quote, comma, and space).

9. Click in the white space after Pu and type in the characters , (comma and space).

10. Click in the white space after Pu and type in the character , (comma and space).

11. Click in the white space after Ye, select the field ISBN in the selection box below the word "Structure", then click on the Insert button. You'll see an IS button appear.

12. Click on OK and you should see a bibliography entry formatted as the following:

You may want to modify the Bibliography Heading and Bibliography 1 styles to customize the appearance of your bibliography (I did so here to get the indentation I wanted).

You'll also want to investigate the Entries tab some more. For the book bibliography entry, see if you can figure out how to make the book title be shown in the Emphasis style.

As you edit your document and add more bibliographic entries, you'll want to right click on the Bibliography and click on Update Index/Table. If you do, be aware that any manual changes you've made to the table's contents will be lost.

NOTE

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Bibliographies       02/17/08

Last modified: 2008.04.25 20:33 UTC