🚀 go-pugleaf

>From:          Randall Sparks <randall@ADVTECH.USWEST.COM>

> This could be fixed if EndNote were to use some sort of hashing-like function
>to generate citation indexes.  If this were done, citations could include some
>informative piece of the reference plus an encoding of the reference that is at
>least highly likely to be unique in any database.

But highly likely to be unique isn't good enough.  It has to be definitely
unique for EndNote to know which reference to use when formatting.

>                                                               As long as the
>key for a citation is generated from author, year, and title, the same citation
>key will be generated for the same reference in all databases.

And then how does the program know which one to use?  And then how do you know
which one has an error in its entry when it shows up in the reference list?  No,
there has to be a unique identifier.

I presume that peoples' problems are arising when writing a paper
collaboratively among people that don't normally share a common reference list.
If the authors have a common reference list there is no problem.  But even then
the formatting is only done once on one machine.  All that is required is that
all entering of reference citations into the text is done by the same author as
will be doing the formatting.  Never been a problem here.