Is there a program for tracking IEEE reference numbers and adjusting their order?
Writing a paper for class, in IEEE format. In-text citations use [x] where x is the number of the reference. Professor is strict about references being numbered based on order of appearance (first reference is [1], second reference is [2], etc). This makes it really hard to input newly found references in previously written sections, since then I have to go through and change all the previous ones to [x+1]. Is there a program or feature that helps with this?
Edit: Hey everyone thanks for the recommendations! I really do appreciate it.
8 replies
The answer is a clear yes.
In short: Choose your tool that will suit you throughout your degree and really dig into it and learn it now while doing your paper.
Long version:
This is absolutely common and I'm not aware of a text editor which supports footnotes but doesn't support automatically numbering and referencing.
In latex there's actually a \footnote that takes care of that. In libre office, if I recall correctly, it's Insert -> Footnote and I'm sure there are templates with the proper formatting and font sizing already in place.
Now it sounds like you're quite early in your higher degree career - depending on your goals and future challenges you might want to either go the easiest route or really dig into writing-based formatting: It's just faster if you're typing all the time to not switch to a mouse to inert footnotes - but only if your really used to it.
Can't most word processors deal with this?
Learn latex if you haven't already -- it's perfect for this! There's a million tutorials out there, overleaf especially is very user friendly
https://help.libreoffice.org/26.2/en-US/text/swriter/menu/edit_reference_submenu.html
Zotero
This is the best answer so far
You can name them with a string that helps you identify them while you're editing, then only when you're finished run search and replace to replace those names with numbers.
Or I guess you could write it in MediaWiki which does exactly this automatically with its references feature. 😁
That's a very clever solution, thank you! I'll take a look at MediaWiki as well.