Treaties in AGLC4. Manuscript/"Extra: 'type: treaty'" not working?

ybanens
Thank you @adamsmith for your excellent AGLC examples at
https://www.zotero.org/groups/684844/aglc_samples/library.

I use the Manuscript item type for UN treaties as suggested, with the 'Type' field containing UNTS details ('opened for signature on...' etc) and then 'type: treaty' in the 'Extra' field. It has worked fine until just this week, when suddenly only the treaty name appears in the citation, in single quotes, which is all kinds of wrong, i.e.

1. 'Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court'.

Can anyone suggest what might be going on?

I've confirmed I'm using the CSL from the Zotero styles picker. I've played around with capitalising and uncapitalising the 'T' in 'treaty' and 'type'. I've tried a new document with a single citation. I've looked in the CSL file but found nothing to guide me (I don't even know enough to be dangerous, luckily).

This is a relatively new Mac/Zotero setup so it's just possible that a Zotero reinstall might be in order, but I thought I'd ask the group's input first.
  • ybanens
    Troubleshooting update: Switching to OSCOLA and capitalising the Extra field as 'Type: treaty' causes the citation to display properly. Switching back to AGLC4 renders the citation incorrectly as above.
  • mitch_mishyy
    edited 2 days ago
    Unfortunately AGLC4's CSL implementation doesn't actually have rules for the CSL treaty type, so it falls back to its default rules. I am curious why it's only just started breaking, though, since it's last update was in 2020...
  • ybanens
    Thanks for your comment @mithc_mishyy—you indirectly helped me to solve the issue!

    After a reinstall of Zotero including trashing the prefs and cache etc, it turns out the problem was actually having the value 'type: treaty' in the Extra field. I must have picked that up from some other discussions and thought I needed to do it here. Although it's recommended for OSCOLA and others, it breaks AGLC formatting (since it's not implemented, as you observed). Removing it causes the Manuscript item to format correctly when recorded in the same way as @adamsmith 's example here: https://www.zotero.org/groups/684844/aglc_samples/collections/ZUI8BMK5/items/RGTEZT3U/collection

    This solution makes it a little bit hard to future-proof, since if/when a treaty type appears in Zotero or AGLC CSL, I can't leave the appropriate field value in Extra: for it to be picked up. It also means I can't create a smart search where 'Extra = type: treaty'. But I can put some other string in the Extra field for the smart search. Or maybe use a #treaty tag. In any case, I don't have hundreds of treaties in my library so it's not a huge deal.

    Thanks again
  • mitch_mishyy
    Unless someone more qualified gets around to it before me, I plan to one day submit a rewrite of the AGLC4 CSL with added support for these sorts of types precisely for that reason. But for now, we're stuck with such issues unfortunately :(

    Glad I could help!
  • ybanens
    AGLC5 has been around the corner for a while now... maybe hold off until then!
  • mitch_mishyy
    Yeah I've seen that—I'm *guessing* it might be released late this year or sometime next^—either way a rewrite at this stage would probably make implementing the 5th ed easier anyway!

    ^ they seem to operate on a roughly 8 year schedule bewteen editions, based on the publication dates of the 1st–4th eds
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