Need <br>, not <p>

My app concatentates several fields to create bibliographic citations, in whatever format the visitor has chosen. The individual components were edited with FCKEditor as they may involve bolding, italics or special characters. The problem I am having is that some of the components are getting returned wrapped in <p>...</p> tags, depending on what was done when the text was entered. When I try to put these into a citation, I get line (paragraph) breaks where I really do not want them.

I see only two solutions to this:
1. progammatically drop any <p> tags before saving the text, or
2. training my users to view the source and remove the <p> tags themselves.

Is there a better way? Is there a way to prevent them being added in the first place?

Thanks,

Reg