Citation formats

Okay, here's a quick question for all you other interdisciplinary types: How do you deal with citations? I mean... okay, here's my problem, journals that I read, have, or might submit to require entirely different formats for citations. On my shelf, among other things, I have:

• Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association
• Chicago Manual of Style
• A Manual for Writers... by Kate L. Turabian
• one of the Longman's A short guide to writing about _____

Each one, proclaiming a slightly different formatting. I'm even running into this issue on my personal research website. For now, I'm just citing things the way I have them written down, or some logical means that I happen upon for the moment. When I taught at the community college, I used to just tell my students (much to the dismay of colleagues) that the rule was to cite enough information that any reasonable person could find the source in a library in five minutes or less. I've just read so many different formats, that I have no idea which is which, and I don't really care.

Remember last month, when I was preparing that dissertation distillation article? I spent about three days simply reformatting the thing (mostly footnotes to endnotes, and changing citation formats). Alright, this is one of the banes of interdisciplinarity. In order to talk to different audiences, you have to learn to speak their language. Sometimes I wish someone would just write up a script that would automatically change citations into various formats.

That doesn't quite handle the issue entirely though, since as I pointed out during that reformatting process just mentioned, some of the reformatting meant rethinking whether something should be an inline citation or a footnote, or perhaps just remade into main text, with or without a citation. No program is going to replace those thought processes. But it could help.

How nice it would be to enter information into fields, then select the formatting from a drop-down list [Chicago;footnote] style please, and brrrling There you go!