Pro-Cite for the Macintosh
Authors: Katherina Klemperer
Journal: Annals of Internal Medicine (1989)

Pro-Cite, now in version 2.1, is probably the most powerful personal bibliographic database management system available for the Macintosh. Others can be found that are cheaper and simpler to use, but these are generally called reference managers, rather than database managers, and thus provide a smaller set of functions than Pro-Cite. Pro-Cite is oriented toward the building of databases and the production of bibliographies. One builds and maintains a database either by entering data by hand or by importing data from another file. Databases or subsets may be sorted by a variety of sort keys, and editing operations may be performed globally on multiple records. The database can be searched to create subsets. Selected records from the database may be formatted and printed or saved to disk as bibliographies or exported in formats readable by other database systems. It is possible to use a Pro-Cite database to generate a bibliography from in-line citations in a word-processing document, but Pro-Cite does not offer the functionality of generating, in-line footnotes. Version 2.1 is network aware, allowing multiple users on networked Macintoshes to work with the same database. Only one user may access the database for editing, although several users may be using it in read-only mode. A reduced-price read-only version of the software, allowing a user to read existing databases but not to update them, is in progress. According to the product documentation, Pro-Cite will manage up to 100,000 records in a single database, with a maximum size of 32,000 characters per record. To build or edit the content of a database, one works with the database window (see figure 1). The field labels are predefined by Pro-Cite and appear in a column at the left of the data. Inexperienced users may find difficulty with the field name abbreviations, especially since more than one field may have the same abbreviation. There are twenty-six predefined work forms (in figure 1, Book, Long Form; a few other work forms are Journal, Short Form, Dissertation, Letter), which contain the likely fields for each type of citation. New work forms can be created, and old ones modified, but the user needs to beware, because each field is linked to an internal field number with certain immutable qualifies that do not change with a change in field label. By using the appropriate menu choices and clicking on the correct buttons, one may add new records or edit existing ones. It is also possible to import records en masse from another database system. Importing a file saved from an online search service session or a CD-ROM requires a separate program called Biblio-Link, purchased individually for each service. A Biblio-Link program can also be purchased for importing raw MARC records. Pro-Cite can directly import data that has been formatted in tab-delimited or comma-delimited format, requiring that all defined fields exist in the proper order. Several OPAC vendors now provide the ability to download records in Pro-Cite's import format. The output of a database is a bibliography. The key to formatting a bibliography is the punctuation file, which specifies the formatting of each field for output. A number of predefined punctuation files are provided, including all the predominant citation formats (MLA, Chicago, Science, Turabian, and so on). By choosing a punctuation file and then selecting the PRINT BIBLIOGRAPHY or SELECTED RECORDS TO DISK commands, one can print or save the formatted bibliography. New punctuation files can be created for a personal style or for a template that can be used for compiling load-ready files for other database systems. Pro-Cite offers powerful searching features. Full-text searching, although slow, allows you to find any character string anywhere in any record. Limited searching, also a slow sequential scan of the database, searches only specified fields. Quick searching, by far the fastest, is a true index search. …