some author related issues, remarks, and ideas.

[Christian Glahn]

Hi everybody,

first of all, thanks for this pretty neat tool. I like it a lot -
although I just started using it. 

At this moment the tool has a very strong note of its origins in
technology related sciences. I really would like to use the tool but
there are some things that I like to remark.

One (the first) thing that feels strange for my personal scientific
background (which is educational technology research) is that the first
names of the authors are shortened in a strange way (only first letters,
not dots between the names). 

In my department we use APA style for referencing, which requires the
dots after each initial of an author. This is not so much of a problem,
but SOME of the journals in which we are publishing, even like to have
the complete first name of the authors in the references.

I double checked and I found that Crossref for example provides the full
name of a contributor. So when I resolve the metadata via Crossref
referencer removes some information. I wonder why this is done?

A second thing that I came across was that when I resolved metadata via
Crossref, referencer overwrites manually entered information. This is
was a bit frustrating because for me because I entered some complete
author records in 1.0.4 and when I toyed around with updating the
records via Crossref in 1.1.1, I suddenly had fewer authors in the
references. This happens because Crossref provides only incomplete
datasets for the contributors for some journals. 

In such cases it would be cool, if referencer would detect if there is
already some metadata for a document, and smartly extends the meta data.
Such smart expansion could also be very useful in the future because
many journals start having "online first" publications, where the
meta-data remains incomplete for the online only period (sometimes for
more than two years). 

I think in these cases reference should update the records instead of
replacing the complete meta data.

The third thing that I was missing a way of accessing/filtering the
documents not only via tags but also via author names. This would be a
really useful feature for people who work like I do: "oh yeah, there was
this article published by Donald Norman. What was its exact title
again ...". 

This would mean that there has to be some author index, too. There are
some nice approaches to make it easy to maintain such an author index,
like the one that comes with endnote(tm). 
 
OK, these are lot of comments for a first time posting. I know that they
are more a wish list than anything else, but I would like to contribute
and discuss these things from a user perspective. 

Cheers 
Christian