Passing quoted strings to bat files?

[Angel Tsankov]

I have a list of citations (e.g. citations = "This is citation 1" "This is 
citation 2" "This is citation 3") and I want to pass this variable as the 
first argument to a batch file. I've already tried this:

var := $(shell do_smth_with_citations.bat $(citations))     # does not work 
as desired
var := $(shell do_smth_with_citations.bat "$(citations)")   # does not work 
as desired, either

Other suggestions are welcome.