There is just a practical demonstration of using and formatting citations. Consider it a tutorial, but there is really nothing new to be learnt here.

We used the CITESTYLE INTEXTDEF format (-X) citation, for example "(Walsh, Muellner and Stayton, 1999)", throughout in this document. This, so-called parenthetic allusion, effortlessly switches presentation style between numerically ordered (numeric) and alphabetically sorted (author-year) bibliography formats.

However we could have used an AUTHORONLY (-A) format to say something like, "Walsh, Muellner and Stayton wrote a tremendously useful book — DocBook: The Definitive Guide (1999)" where we followed followed the explicit title with a YEARONLY (-Y) format citation. Like INTEXTDEF, the year can change from being a year (obviously), to a numerical reference, according to the specifics of the CITESTYLE file you choose. It really is a shame though that we can't explicitly cite the reference title here though.

Anyway, those are the most portable citation formats across the different styles. But, if you know from the outset that you will only be using an author-year format, then it would be perfectly ok to go using Whole AUTHORYEAR, (-W) style citations, willy nilly, to your hearts content, so long as the sentence grammar remains intact and for example, Walsh, Muellner and Stayton (1999) as well as the USA Library of Congress (2004), do not object to having their names cast about gratuitously, just to illustrate a rather irrelevant issue. You should note, that AUTHORYEAR is not supported by RefDB propper, so in the event you switch from RefDB-lite to full RefDB support, using the runbib command, you might be sadly disappointed.

Just for the record though, most bibliographic styles do not include a parenthetic AUTHORONLY mode, for the simple reason that it does not in general discriminate unambiguously between different references by the same author(s). You could however construct your own CITESTYLE to achieve this effect if it was really important to you.

Beyond the foregoing it starts to get tricky, as we move into the domain of multiple citations. For instance Markus appears to be really quite a prolific chap herein, with four references to his name (Hoenicka, 2005; Hoenicka, 2005b; Hoenicka, 2005c; Hoenicka, 2005d), created as:

<citation role="REFDB">
<biblioref endterm="RefDB-X"/>
<biblioref endterm="RefDB_Man-X"/>
<biblioref endterm="RISX-X"/>
<biblioref endterm="CITESTYLE-X"/>
</citation>

But sadly this package, RefDB-lite, doesn't really do him justice, formatting wise. A good formatting package, in an author-year mode, would have contracted that down to something like (Hoenicka, 2005; 2005b; 2005c; 2005d). Possibly we could simulate that by citing years on the last three, e.g. (Hoenicka, 2005; 2005b; 2005c; 2005d), but that is more fluffing around than is really desireable in an automated world. In a numeric CITESTYLE scheme, of course that is irrelevant, as it contracts quite nicely to something like "(3—6)".

For the final citation formatting tests, it is useful to examine the treatment of multiple references, particularly sequential references in a numeric style. For example

<citation role="REFDB">
<biblioref endterm="Walsh99-X"/>
<biblioref endterm="MODS-X"/>
<biblioref endterm="RefDB_Man-X"/>
<biblioref endterm="RISX-X"/>
<biblioref endterm="CITESTYLE-X"/>
<biblioref endterm="XSLT_1.0-X"/>
</citation>

(One could really get carried away here). Now that parenthetic allusion renders as: "(Hoenicka, 2005b; Hoenicka, 2005c; Hoenicka, 2005d; Library of Congress, 2004; W3C, 1999; Walsh, Muellner and Stayton, 1999)". But watch what happens if we change the citation order to:

<citation role="REFDB">
<biblioref endterm="XSLT_1.0-X"/>
<biblioref endterm="RefDB_Man-X"/>
<biblioref endterm="Walsh99-X"/>
<biblioref endterm="RISX-X"/>
<biblioref endterm="MODS-X"/>
<biblioref endterm="CITESTYLE-X"/>
</citation>

Hopefully the citations "(Hoenicka, 2005b; Hoenicka, 2005c; Hoenicka, 2005d; Library of Congress, 2004; W3C, 1999; Walsh, Muellner and Stayton, 1999)" are now ordered and sorted identically to the previous example. Note that these biblioref references explictly used the portable -X formatting command. Watch out for that or your carefully crafted document may unexpectedly transform into rubbish!

Clearly there are certain issues to be settled regarding optional sorting and reordering of multiple bibliorefs, but thats a job for another day.

A better chap than I might also have demonstrated the presentation of accented characters and foreign language titles etc. But I don't know nuttin' bout such things.

So that concludes tonights viewing. Goodnight.