Pharmacoeconomics journal style

rwielage

We are submitting an article to the journal PharmacoEconomics. There are a few inaccuracies in the current style implementation. We have the document "Instructions for Authors for Preparation of Manuscripts for PharmacoEconomics" in pdf format which we can provide as well as pdfs of articles published in the format. Specific errors we have identified in the current implementation follow.

Citations:
1) Should be superscripted.
2) Should use brackets rather than parentheses.

References:
1) References do not end with a period.
2) et al. is used for more than 3 authors. (Currently it lists up to 6 authors.)
3) The body of each reference is indented.
4) Page numbers such as "1545-1547" are shortened to "1545-7".
5) The publisher of a book is formatted "City (ST): Publisher, YYYY". States are in parentheses, but countries are not.
6) Online sources end with "Available from URL: http:// . . . [Accessed YYYY Mon DD]". Yes, "URL" appears.
7) In online sources the phrase "[online]" is inserted just before the period of the segment immediately preceding #6 above.

Here's a correctly formatted online reference:
35. Sanders DM. Theoretical Biology and Biophysics Group, Los Alamas. National Laboratory. Human papilomaviruses sequence database [online]. Available from URL: http://hpv.web.lanl.gov/ [Accessed 1997 Aug 13]

Thanks! If someone could take this on, I'd happily send them the author instructions and samples from the journal.

Ron

adamsmith

OK - send you PM with email address.

adamsmith

go here:
http://gist.github.com/293083
download using the Raw link on the top right.
Install by dragging the downloaded file to an open Firefox window.

Please report back here.

Some notes:

1), 3), 4), 5) aren't possible with the current Zotero. Also, the superscript in brackets only works so-so. Specifically, if you have 2 citations in a multiple citations, you'll get [37][38] instead of [37, 38] - it's right for 1 and 3+ citations, thought.

I also fixed a bunch of other things, especially spacing issues. Let me know what's still missing.

rwielage

adamsmith,

How do I know it's been installed? When I drag and drop nothing seems to happen. When I choose PharmacoEconomics in a document, the style doesn't seem to have changed.

Thanks!

adamsmith

when you drag the file to FF you should get a little pop-up asking if you want to update the style pharmacoeconomics.
If not, run me through what exactly you're doing - maybe my instructions aren't clear.

rwielage

When I downloaded, it opened a new pane in FF. I was selecting the text from that pane and dragging it into another new pane. I needed to save it as a file and drag the file from explorer to FF.

Pharmacoeconomics requires lower case in article titles (except for proper nouns). Other styles may require mixed case. How does Zotero handle that?

adamsmith

ok, so you got it installed now, right?
We recommend storing all your article information in "sentence case" - i.e. with the first letter and proper nouns capitalized. Zotero is able to convert that into "title-case" where needed.
In theory, Zotero also does sentence case conversion, but the problem is that there is no way (and I don't think there ever will be) that it can recognize proper nouns as such - (how to distinguish, e.g., (J.S) Mill from the corn mill) - so we don't write that into styles.

rwielage

Yep, it's installed. Saving in "sentence case" is a good solution.

A co-worker will be adding to this discussion. She's found a few additional issues, including journal abbreviations that have been downloaded from PubMed with periods, but Pharmacoeconomics doesn't use periods in journal abbreviations. Can the style strip them out? (Like a javascript string.replace(".","")?)

Thanks for your help. Zotero is a great tool!

adamsmith

stripping out periods from abbreviations will be possible in the next version of csl, but isn't currently.

rwielage

What's the ETA of the next version of CSL?

I hope the feature in CSL will be to specify in the style whether abbreviations should have periods regardless of how they are stored in the user's database. That is, that it have the ability to add periods (if they aren't there) as well as strip them out.

Thanks!

adamsmith

adding periods is very hard to do, so no, that's not going to be possible.
In the medium run, though, the whole question of abbreviations will be used through abbreviations lists, somewhat similar to the solutions in bibTeX and Endnote.

csl 1.0 has just been released and is scheduled for inclusion in Zotero 2.1 - ETA is some time this year ;-).

Rintze

csl 1.0 has just been released

We're not there yet. But we're feature-frozen and are at release candidate 2.

rwielage

Please consider the changes to the Pharmacoeconomics style complete. The person working with this is satisfied, within the possibilities of current style features.

Is there a way to obtain the code that formats references so we could add the feature to styles to format journal abbreviations with or without periods? We have several software developers who code in a variety of languages . . .

adamsmith

of course, Zotero is open source -
chrome://zotero/content/xpcom/csl.js
is the zotero implementation of the csl citation language on your local machine (the actual file is part of the zotero.jar archive which you can search for on your harddisk.)

Rintze

CSL 1.0 styles will be able to specify whether or not periods should be stripped from journal abbreviations.

http://bitbucket.org/bdarcus/csl-docs/src/dc1eca8534d0/upgrade-notes.txt#cl-878

adamsmith

The PharmacoEconomics style is now in the repository. Please report any problems in this thread (please note the above posts on Zotero limitations before posting).

rwielage

There was one more thing we found, although it didn't affect PharmacoEconomics since we manually stripped the periods from the abbreviations. That was that the style ended the journal section of the reference with a period even if the abbreviation had a period. This would result in double periods.

When will CSL 1.0 be out and used in Zotero?

adamsmith

for csl 1.0 implementation (planned for Zotero 2.1) I don't think right now you'll get something more specific as some time this year.