User:Philcha/Sandbox/Citing

AKAIK there are 6 ways to give page numbers for books or long journal articles:
 * etc. forces readers to search manually for the work. IMO that's horrible.
 * has the risk that the ref name and the page number(s) are split by a careless editor.
 * Using different refs for different parts of the same work. Becomes unusable for both editors and readers if there many parts of the same work.
 * Cite with r, where each use of r links to a citation and also shows a page number (range) in the main text. Disadvantage: shows page number (range) in the main text. Advantage: gets the reader to the work in 1 click rather than 2.
 * Harv etc. Advantage: does not show page number (range) in the main text. Disadvantage: gets the reader to the work in 2 clicks rather than 1,and 2 more clicks back to the text; (I think) equivalent of a ref name= appears after the 1st click, and can be as long and obscure.
 * sfn etc. Advantage: does not show page number (range) in the main text; sorts page numbers in the same work so that each group of refs to the name page(s) appear as abcdef..., as in the output of  - while AFAIK Harv does not sort and group page numbers, and you get a longer list of "refs". Disadvantage: gets the reader to the work in 2 clicks rather than 1,and 2 more clicks back to the text; equivalent of a ref name= appears after the 1st click, and can be as long and obscure.
 * Are there other choices?
 * PS If you want realistic examples, I used Cite with r at e.g. Phaeacius and sfn at Robert Rossen.
 * PPS I current use Cite with r, as IMO the page numbers in the main text are not obstructive and this method uses fewer clicks; YYMV. This method also plays nicely with the basic , which is most editors learn first, and avoids a mixing of citation methods, which Cite does not like.