Alena jumped. No one was there. The lab was empty. Then her monitor flickered. The EndNote window glitched, and a new field appeared: . In gray, monospaced font, the words typed themselves:
Her hand cramped. There were over twenty names. She whispered a curse into the stale air of her cubicle.
Her advisor, a gruff physical chemist named Professor Hammond, had one unbreakable rule: “If you used Gaussian 09, you cite it properly. Not the manual. The primary literature. And it goes into EndNote perfectly, or I will print your .log files and eat them.”
She collapsed into her chair. The cursor blinked. She had spent 45 minutes wrestling a citation. gaussian 09 citation endnote
She began to type. Author: Frisch, M. J. and then the legion of co-authors: Trucks, G. W.; Schlegel, H. B.; Scuseria, G. E.; Robb, M. A.; Cheeseman, J. R.; Scalmani, G.; Barone, V.; Mennucci, B.; Petersson, G. A.; et al.
The monitor flickered again. The ghost was back.
Alena’s soul left her body.
She returned to Word. She re-inserted the citation. The document updated.
She sighed. “Fine.” She typed all 23 names manually.
She clicked . She named it “Angewandte – Full Gaussian Hell.” Alena jumped
Alena wanted to cry. She opened . She navigated through a labyrinth of menus: Bibliography > Author Lists . She un-checked the box that said “Use et al. if there are more than 3 authors.”
The citation appeared: (Frisch, M. J.; Trucks, G. W.; Schlegel, H. B.; Scuseria, G. E.; Robb, M. A.; Cheeseman, J. R.; Scalmani, G.; Barone, V.; Mennucci, B.; Petersson, G. A.; et al., 2009)
The screen typed again: “I am the ghost of citations past. You will cite every author, or your SCF cycle will never converge.” Then her monitor flickered
She closed her laptop. She walked to the vending machine, bought a stale granola bar, and ate it in the dark. Somewhere in the server room, a cluster of CPUs hummed a requiem for the hours of her life she would never get back.