Tweaks to an existing style
I wonder if anyone can help. The reference style of the American Political Science Association is quite close to the styles we use for our journals ... with a few tweaks the APSA style could be the Zotero APSjournals style.
Title -- not in quotes
Volume / page
Whereas the APSA style contains a reference to issue, our style calls only for Volume:Page (with no spaces).
Steve Kronmiller
The American Phytopathological Society
Title -- not in quotes
Volume / page
Whereas the APSA style contains a reference to issue, our style calls only for Volume:Page (with no spaces).
Steve Kronmiller
The American Phytopathological Society
look here for how to get a new style into Zt, where to format etc.:
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/5104/modifying-word-plugin-using-journal-abbreviation-instead-of-publication-name/#Item_2
for your specific requests
1. Title -- not in quotes
remove quotes="true"
from this
<else-if type="chapter">
<text macro="title" prefix=" " suffix="." quotes="true"/>
<group class="container" prefix=" " delimiter=" ">
<text term="in" text-case="capitalize-first"/>
and this
<else>
<group prefix=" " delimiter=" " suffix=".">
<text macro="title" quotes="true"/>
<text macro="editor" />
</group>
2. Volume:Page (with no spaces).
change
<group prefix=" ">
<text variable="volume" />
<text variable="issue" prefix="(" suffix=")"/>
</group>
<text variable="page" prefix=": "/>
</group>
to
this:
<group prefix=" ">
<text variable="volume" />
<text variable="page" prefix=":" suffix=""/>
</group>
</group>
Then please submit the style to the repository
@Steve: please check it, and list any additional metadata (documentation link, field(s), etc.) that should be added here.
I'd also like to strongly urge people like Steve, BTW, to host these styles themselves. For authors, it's really convenient to be able to go to a journal website and just click to install the style (CSL is now starting to be used in a number of different projects; not just Zotero). That's in fact always been the vision behind CSL. If you're willing to do that, it'd be make sense to remove this one from the zotero repo.
Dan, if you're around, can we document somewhere the .htaccess rules and such that would make it easy for people like Steve to do this?
Yeah; maybe we need a little webservice for this. The RVP thing that accompanies RNV would probably be good for this.
The only format, BTW, that is reasonable to convert to is the RNG XML syntax; neither XSD nor DTDs are rich enough to represent CSL.
If I'm not mistaken, Zotero's SVN validates CSL using an pre-commit hook for rnv. If this is the case, perhaps we should do more to encourage "commit early, commit often" of styles to force people to validate styles they write.
In most cases, it seems like only more-or-less final styles are committed. This does have advantages to those looking forward to using the style, but disadvantages for style developers who want to collaborate and get assistance in fixing a style.
http://validator.nu/
Selecting a style (e.g. https://www.zotero.org/trac/export/4227/csl/apa.csl), the CSL schema (either http://xbiblio.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/xbiblio/csl/schema/trunk/csl.rnc or csl.rng) and checking the option "Be lax about HTTP Content-Type" does the trick.
Note, though: the styles in the SVN (like the apa.csl above) are not valid because of the empty updated value. Would be nice, following noksagt's point, if this value was inserted/updated as a pre-commit, and then validated.
As far as I know a pre-commit hook can't modify the contents of the commit (because then the working copy would be immediately out of date).
If there's a consensus to go that route, I'd be happy to make the change.
I think it would make sense, then, for Zotero to add section of links to third-party styles and repos.
Finally, what do you mean by the following?
re: My only hangup was that the metadata available for our journals does not quite match the criteria of our own reference style ... so I will need to do a bit of work on our metadata to get a better match
For instance, our journals abbreviations are not listed properly in our metadata (this is an easy fix); and, our recommended citation style calls for intital caps in the title of an article and then lower case unless the title includes proper names; and authors are listed in our metadata by first and second name initials sometimes, and sometimes by full name -- our style calls for intitials only.
In response to hosting the styles ... having the style available in the Zotero list would be very convenient ... but if you host every publishers' style, the list could get fairly long.
In terms of web-space hosting a couple of thousand styles is vanishingly small in comparison to the synced libraries.
As for Metadata - some of this you'll indeed have to fix, but Zotero can deal with initials vs. whole first names.
Though, where to host a file does bring up a good design question: I don't really like the idea of multiple copies of a particular style floating around (lest a publisher need to update both their file & the one in public repositories, such as Zotero's). This happens with bibtex and endnote style files to some extent, so it is manageable. But it might be more elegant to have the style in a single, canonical location & to have dependent styles at other locations point to the canonical version. I haven't tried: is this currently possible with Zotero's implementation of CSL?
Consider also that we've long talked about exploiting some of the Atom-friendliness of CSL (it's metadata design is basically stolen from Atom) to allow users to subscribe to CSL repositories (or portions of repositories), and have the styles they activate be automatically updated.
So while I agree with you that it should be easy for Zotero users to get journal-hosted CSL styles, and for journals to signal they support Zotero, I don't think it follows that the best way to do this is to have copies of all CSL styles hosted in the Zotero repository. As an author, I really just want to go to my journal site, and click some CSL logo to install and activate the style (ideally for any CSL-compliant application on my system). I have to go there anyway, after all, to get all the other details of the style guidelines (which reminds me; would be nice if all journals also hosted templates for OOXML and ODF).
Finally, what noksagt said.
And, I would love to code switches to reduce an author's whole first name to an initial ... Can you tell me how to go about it?
Rick is asking whether a dependent style in the Zotero repo can point to a style hosted somewhere else. I would presume the answer is yes, but I don't know.
BTW, my concern about this is tied to the fact that different applications are now implementing CSL, and they're not doing it in a consistent way. Mendeley, for example, stores their CSL files (which I think they just copy from the Zotero archive) in the application package. This really isn't what I want to happen, where projects are forking styles effectively, and a user may have multiple versions of the same style scattered across their account.
In general, I'm a big believer in distributed (linked) data and styles.