Possible to write a citation style where titles are hyperlinked to urls?

rlskoeser

I did some searching and found some old queries on the forum about this with the answer that it was not possible, but they were all multiple years old so I thought it would be worth asking again as things may have changed.

Is there any way to customize a CSL so that the title of the item is generated as an html link using the url or doi when one is defined, rather than displaying a bare url at the end of the citation?

I looked at the CSL spec and examples but I haven't been able to figure out if there's any way to do this.

adamsmith

Nothing new on this. It's not possible to hyperlink components of citations using CSL, no.

rlskoeser

Thanks for responding, kind of suspected that but good to know for sure.

How hard would it be to support something like this? Is there any development happening on CSL or is it pretty static? Could this be implemented somewhere else, or is CSL the right place?

adamsmith

CSL updates happen at a pretty slow pace, both structurally and philosophically. My view is that something like this would be better handle by some sort of post processing (i.e., as a setting in the references manager) than in the citation styles, but other people disagree. It would be a pretty significant CSL change since the current language doesn't contain any non-visible elements (such as the link address).

The logic for putting any such features in the reference manager/implementation from where I'm sitting is that folks will want different parts hyperlinked and they'll want this in different styles, so a reference manager setting provides a lot more flexibility to do this over requiring every such option to be coded into a new style.

rlskoeser

That all makes sense, thanks for explaining. I did get the sense that CSL was generating text only without markup, so I could see implementing something like this would require major changes.

So is there a way to do something like this in Zotero?

dstillman

We're planning to add an option to hyperlink URLs and DOIs, probably as an option when unlinking citations (along with cross-linking citations to references within the document). I guess titles could be another option to account for styles that don't require URLs/DOIs.

adamsmith

This doesn't come up as often as the DOI/URL hyperlinking, but it's a fairly common request, so it'd be nice to add, yes.

rlskoeser

It would be great to have an option to make the title of the item link to the DOI/URL - it's a nice, readable short-form for a web citation. We're currently doing this manually for adding citations to a web site and I started trying to customize a CSL rule and got stuck. In this case I'm using the "create bibiliography" from item and copying to the clipboard, in case that matters for where you're thinking about this implementation (the comment about unlinking citations made me wonder).

FWIW, it's my understanding that a text-based link like a title is better for accessibility since screen readers read out the full URLs.