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[Elizabeth Shown Mills <small>(1944- )</small> [broken link<code>http://www4.samford.edu/schools/ighr/faculty/mills_e.html Elizabeth Shown Mills</code> [https://web.archive.org/web/20100102013137/ Internet Archive page]] is an eminent American genealogist who has [https://www.librarything.com/author/millselizabethshown&all=1 written extensively ] about collecting, analyzing, and citing evidence in genealogical research and publications, including the books "''[httphttps://www4lccn.samfordloc.edu/schools/ighr/facultygov/mills_e.html 97072909 Evidence! Citation and Analysis for the Family Historian] ''" and an expanded version, "''[httphttps://www.amazonevidenceexplained.com/Evidence-Explained-History-Artifacts-Cyberspaceindex.php/dp/0806318066/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1 Evidence Explained: Citing Family History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace]''". (The 1st edition was awarded the ''Library Journal 2007 Best Reference''. A revised 3rd edition was released in 2018) While most readers focus on the formats of the citations provided in the books, in reality every publisher has a style guide and Evidence Explained isn't used by any of them. The real value in these books is Mills's explanation of how to effectively analyze the evidence and how to integrate the many pieces of evidence (and Mills is well known for taking the "reasonably exhaustive search" requirement of the [http://www.bcgcertification.org/resources/standard.html BCG's Genealogical Proof Standard] to the absolute limit) into a well supported conclusion.
→Background: fix link rot
Many users, particularly if they aren't experienced researchers, may have difficulty abstracting the details from the wide variety of source types they encounter into the 4 fields that Gramps provides. Worse, the 4 fields aren't really adequate to capture all of the possible source information and redisplay it in well-formatted footnotes or endnotes in a report or reference links in a web page.
Citation styles are the concern of published material, and will differ both for the medium and for the publisher. So long as the necessary information of creator, title, enclosing work (for e.g. magazine or jouranl articles), publisher (if published) or repository (if not), date, and details (like page number) are available in the citation, the style isn't very important to the reader. Publishers want all of their publications to have a consistent style and issue style manuals to help authors prepare their work.
* Thompson-Reuters [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EndNote EndNote] is easily the most popular commercial reference management program. It uses a proprietary file format which has nevertheless been reverse-engineered many times so that bibliographies can be easily exchanged between EndNotes and other reference managers.
* Most of the major commercial genealogy programs use a proprietary relational schema for storage of citation data. These fall into two broad categories, binary (similar to GRAMPS's key/value schema, where a citation is composed of several records each having a key/value pair and the program's logic parses the keys to display the citation in the desired format), single-table (where a database tuple is defined which contains the maximum needed fields, each of which is assigned a value according to a parsing scheme in the programs logic), and multiple-table, where different citation types are stored in tables with tuple schema which reflect the requirements of each. As so often in programming, each has costs and benefits with respect totoo. === Bibliography ===
= Further Reading =
