GC Command

When you use the Set Reference Style dialog to select a database, a citation style and a reference list style for a document, a GC|OP command (General Citation, Options) is inserted at the top of the document. This command includes information about the database associated with the document, the in-text citation style, the reference list style and more.

When you insert a citation, a GC|CI command (General Citation, Citation) is inserted. This command provides information about the citation (record number in database, author, title, date, etc.)

1. If you are creating a citation-only note (that is, without any non-citation text), you should use F7 to insert that citation. This will automatically create the note, bracketed (on the outside) by an opening <GC|CI..> and an empty <GC> at the end when you close that note.

2. If you instead open the note first, and then press F7 to cite inside it, but do not type any non-citation text, when you close the note, NB will move the double GC commands described above from inside the note (where you see them when the note is open) to outside of the note, to match case #1 above.

3. This is done so that all citation-only notes (a) have the same form, and so that they (b) can be converted to different forms (such as short forms) – Ibidem only changes the text between the opening <GC|CI…> and the closing <GC> when it updates citations in the file, and if the text remained encoded as <FN<GC|CI…>full program-generated note<GC>> then it would replace the “full program-generated note” with a short form, but would otherwise keep it as note (with only that short form), which is not correct.

4. This moving of GC commands outside of the note (as described in point #2 above) would not happen if the note contained any non-citation text that you added, since even if you were to change the format of the citations in the paper to (for example) a short-form, you would want that non-citation text to remain (with the note itself now a short form within that fuller note).

5. That said, if you delete a citation-only note (that is, one surrounded by external GC commands), we clearly need to also automatically delete those external GC commands, since if they remain, the note will eventually be regenerated (this is what would have happened in NB 12 when you pressed Alt+F7 to update the citations; you see it more often in 13 since we automatically update citations in various contexts, such as when you return to page-layout view from codes view)

When you update the citations in a document, a GC|PR command (General Citation, Put Reference List) is inserted at the point where the reference list will appear in the document.