Advanced Workflows release notes

Advanced Workflows 1.3

Released 7 July 2026

Improvements

• Citation Matching:
  • Citations to individual panels within unnumbered figures—for example, "(Figure, A)" or "(Figure, A–C)"—are now recognised.
  • Alternative object names—such as "Exhibit"—and non-English language object names—such as "Tableau"—are now correctly recognised.
• Harvard-to-Vancouver Citation Conversion:
  • Reference tags added by SmartReferences v2.0 (or later) are now supported.

Fixes

• Citation Matching:
  • Object labels in caption paragraphs, such as "Exhibit 1.", assigned to the No Citations style set are now correctly identified.
  • Panel letters that appear in Figure Caption Continued paragraphs are now correctly identified, preventing incorrect "uncited" warnings for multi-part figure captions.
  • An incorrect warning no longer appears when a figure citation includes panel letters but the figure caption does not explicitly list them, for example, 'Fig. 2A' citing a caption that reads 'Fig. 2.'.
  • Author-date citations with two or three authors are now identified more accurately, reducing false "unmatched citation" warnings for references with multi-word author surnames, for example, 'van den Berg'.
  • A standalone year is no longer incorrectly marked as an author-date citation when no author name precedes it.
  • Publications with paragraph styles assigned to the Bibliographic References - Citation Optional style set are now handled correctly, avoiding process failures and incorrect uncited-reference warnings.
  • Superscript 2 or 3 is no longer treated as a citation in units of area or volume—for example, mm² or mm³.
• Export Preflight:
  • Keyword processing no longer fails when the first keyword in a list is formatted in italic or bold.
  • Author degrees that contain periods, such as M.Sc. or M.B.B.Ch., are no longer duplicated.

Workflows with no changes in this release

No functional changes were made to the following workflows in this release:

• Author-Date Reference Sorting
• Bibliographic Citation Renumbering
• Check Numbered Citation Order
• Convert and Clean Citation Style
• Duplicate Affiliation Checking
• Fix All Caps and Small Caps
• Table Footnote Matching

Advanced Workflows 1.2

Released 23 June 2026

Improvements

• All workflows:
  • Advanced Workflows now labels its warning comments with the correct workflow name, making them easier to identify and filter in Word's review panel.
• Citation Matching:
  • Author-date citations where the author's name contains accented or non-ASCII characters, for example "Bécel et al. (2020)" are now correctly matched.
  • A wider range of author-date citation formats are now recognised, including citations where the year directly follows the author name without a comma for example, "(Franke 2013)" and groups of citations separated by commas rather than semicolons for example, "(Franke 2013, Smith 2015)".
  • Author-date citations preceded by other text inside the same parentheses—for example, "(see also; Smith, 2020)"—are now handled correctly.
  • References that contain more than one year—such as preprints with an original and a revised date—are now handled correctly.
  • Additional author-date citation formats identified during extended testing are now recognised.
  • Figure citations that include a lowercase panel letter—such as "Figure 3a" or "Figure 5b"—are now recognised.
  • The warning comments inserted when citations cannot be found now use clearer wording.
• Author-Date Reference Sorting:
  • Reference entries marked up by SmartReferences are now correctly reordered. Reference tags stay attached to their reference when the list is sorted.
• Export Preflight:
  • Authors are now correctly matched to their affiliations in documents that contain more than one author section—for example, a main author block and a separate correspondence section.
  • Improved tagging of author names that refer to a group or organisation (for example, the ATLAS Collaboration or the UKPDS Group).

Fixes

• Citation Matching:
  • Figure caption labels no longer extend into the caption text when the caption begins with an uppercase abbreviation such as "US".
  • In-text citations are now correctly paired with references even when the reference number includes punctuation such as a period or parentheses.
  • Fixed an issue where a figure referenced within another figure's caption was tagged as a label rather than a citation.
• Convert and Clean Citation Style:
  • An unnecessary comma no longer appears before a reformatted citation when the citation is followed by a period.
• Citation Order Checking:
  • Citation ranges inside table cells (for example, [118-137]) no longer cause an error.
• Bibliographic Citation Renumbering:
  • Table citations and Word comments are no longer modified or removed when the document has previously been processed by Citation Order Checking.
  • Word comments inserted by Citation order checking no longer cause modifications to table citations.

Known issues

• Harvard-to-Vancouver Citation Conversion does not yet support SmartRefs 2.0 reference tags. This will be fixed in a future release.

Advanced Workflows 1.1

Released 22 May 2026

What's new

• All workflows:
  • Each publication can now have its own citation configuration that overrides the global default. When no publication-specific configuration exists, workflows fall back to the global default.

Improvements

• Citation Matching:
  • Citations are now matched only in the style configured for your publication, eliminating false matches from other citation styles in the same document.
  • Author-date citations where "et al." is formatted in italic are now recognised correctly.
  • You can now rerun Citation Matching on a document without producing unnecessary warnings. Citation and label styles are cleared before processing, so each run starts from a clean state.
  • You can now match author-date citations regardless of the configured publication style, enabling the Harvard-to-Vancouver Conversion workflow without manual configuration changes between steps.
• Bibliographic Citation Renumbering:
  • Single unnumbered objects (such as a figure, table, or box) cited without a number no longer cause a failure. When configured for unnumbered objects, those citations are skipped. When not configured, a warning comment appears at the citation.
  • Reference entries marked up by SmartReferences are now correctly reordered. Reference tags stay attached to their reference when the list is sorted.
• Export Preflight:
  • Affiliations where a location word can be either a country or a state are now parsed more reliably using surrounding context.
  • Affiliation label markers—the superscript numbers, letters, or symbols that link authors to their affiliations—are now tagged with the af_label character style, including any adjacent punctuation or whitespace.
  • Affiliation labels formatted as a number followed by a closing parenthesis (for example, 1), 2), 3)) are now recognised.
  • Handling of affiliation entries where the institution name contains commas has improved. Organisation names in the special organisations reference file now take priority before the affiliation splits into its components.
  • Academic degree abbreviations (such as M.D. and Ph. D.) in author lines are now correctly distinguished from name initials.
  • Author names that include middle initials written without periods (for example, "Jonas SO Andersson") are now parsed correctly.
  • Introductory text before collaborative author names (for example, "and" or "on behalf of") is now tagged with the au_collab-type character style for consistent XML export handling.
  • Author line markers that combine an affiliation number or letter with a footnote symbol (for example, 1* or 3†) are now matched independently, eliminating unnecessary warnings about unmatched markers.
• Harvard-to-Vancouver Conversion:
  • Improved the handling of inline citations where the author name is part of the sentence, such as "Scarborough (2018)." Now the author name is retained and only the year is replaced with the citation number for example, "Scarborough [44]."
• Table Footnote Matching:
  • Footnote symbols formatted in bold, italic, or highlighted are now correctly identified.
• Duplicate Affiliation Check:
  • Duplicate affiliations are now detected regardless of whether labels use numbers, letters, or symbols. Labels tagged with the af_label character style are now correctly matched regardless of bold or italic formatting.

Fixes

• Convert and Clean Citation Style:
  • Back-to-back parenthetical citations such as (1)(2)(3) are now converted as a group.
  • Superscript 2 or 3 in scientific units (for example, m² or kg/m³) is no longer treated as a citation number.
  • Zero (and numbers starting with zero) are no longer treated as citation numbers.
  • Numbered items in parentheses that follow a colon, semicolon, or comma with a space (for example, (1) none; (2) mild; (3) moderate) are no longer converted as citations.
• Export Preflight:
  • Affiliations are no longer flagged as unmatched when their labels have been tagged with the af_label style.

Advanced Workflows 1.0

Released 30 January 2026

Initial release. Advanced Workflows introduced six workflows for citation processing, reference management, and XML export preparation:

• Author-Date Reference Sorting
• Bibliographic Citation Renumbering
• Check Numbered Citation Order
• Citation Matching
• Convert and Clean Citation Style
• Export Preflight