Why are dates that were not intended as citations marked red?
Every 4-digit year in your paper is treated as a possible citation, and you are asked to review those that cannot be matched with a reference. A certain percentage of them will be as simple as the case below. If the following sentence is encountered, “1960 was an eventful year.”, it would be annotated as “1960* was an eventful year.” All the computer knows is that there is a year with no author either to its left or right. There is a chance that you could have forgotten the author, or misspelled his/her name. However, our marking it red is not really a problem since you will realize instantly that the date is not a citation and will waste no time puzzling over it. Human beings do some things much better than a computer.
