Legal Citation: Editing abbreviations tables for publications and publishers

Customizing the abbreviation tables

One of the most useful aspects of LegalCitation is that it will allow you to enter the full names of journals, reporters, and services in your records, and replace them with abbreviations when your citations are generated. In order for this to work properly, however, you must customize the journal abbreviation table for your own work.

LegalCitation installs two abbreviations tables: one, JOURABS.TXT, that includes many of the law journals, reviews, reporters, and services pertinent to legal research and writing, and another, PUBABS.TXT. that includes most of the courts and publishers you will need to reference. Not all of the possible sources and courts are listed, however, as there is a 52K limit to the size of the abbreviations table in the current version of the program.

In order to use LegalCitation effectively, you will need to edit the file, customizing it for your own research. This simply means you will need to delete those source works that you rarely (or never) cite, so that there will be adequate space in the file, which is limited to 52K, for you to add other journals and sources you have entered in your records. Also, you will need to make certain the abbreviations in the file are correct for the citation style you are using.

To customize the journal abbreviations table:

Click on the Journal Abbreviations icon in the Citation group on your Programs menu. Alternatively, you can use Notepad to open c:\citwin7\jourabs.txt.
The journal abbreviations table will display.
Scroll through the table, and delete the entries in the table for those journals/sources that you rarely cite in your work.
- To delete an entry, mark the entire line.
- Press Delete. Make certain that the entire line is removed, including the hard return.
- You can delete as many lines as you think necessary for your work.

As you are working with your own sources, you will frequently need to edit the journal abbreviations file to add entries.

To add an entry to the table.

Example: adding entry for the Environmental and Planning Law Journal.

Go to the end of the abbreviations file, enter a hard return for a new line, and add the following line of text:
Environmental and Planning Law Journal [TAB] Envtl. & Planning L.J. [HRT]
Make sure that the full name of the journal and the abbreviation are separated by a single tab, and that you put a hard return at the end of the line.
When you are adding entries for your own work, make certain the name matching the name entered in the LegalCitation record is entered first, then a TAB, and then the name you want to replace the first name when your citations are formatted.
Save and close the abbreviations table (JOURABS.TXT or PUBABS.TXT).

Alternatively, you can add the entry so that your journal abbreviations are in alphabetical order: Adding entries to your journal abbreviations table in alphabetical order will make it simpler to edit the file later.