Creating a CSL journal/citation style for Zotero using AI?

tapatoga · 2026-10-01T13:08:59+00:00

Quite a while ago (in February this year), I made a request for a journal style that is not available for Zotero yet (https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/129556/style-request-clinical-and-experimental-rheumatology/p1).
Of course, I could create this style myself, which is really nice that this is possible in Zotero but becoming sufficiently acquainted with the CSL syntax to do this takes a bit more time that I would like to invest. I absolutely understand that with some many feature requests and other style requests it is absolutely impossible for the Zotero support team or other more CSL familiar Zotero users to create every requested journal style.

Therefore, my question is: Does someone already have experience with creating a completely new journal style or modifying an existing journal style using an AI tool like ChatGPT in order to create a new similar journal style? If yes, which AI tool did you use and how well did it work? Did it require a lot of tweaking?

damnation · 2026-10-01T13:20:28+00:00

We've seen quite a few AI-made style submissions of varying quality. And when we then send requests for changes the submitter doesn't necessarily know how to fix them or you get a whole new style that you now need to review from scratch. That usually then leaves a style PR in limbo as we'd need to then clean it up/redo ourselves.
It's like with everything with AI. Knowing the subject matter massively increases the quality of what the AI can do.
Also, if your style is mission critical, like for a university paper or thesis, I'd be very careful blindly trusting a created citation style as it could mean you failing/point deductions.
Besides that, journals/unis/publishers should hire people to make styles for them, not have poor endusers have to deal with this. ;)

adamsmith · 2026-10-01T14:07:54+00:00

I agree with this when using basic AI chat tools and I also agree that it's a problem if you can't properly understand feedback received (and AI tools, especially chat based ones, generally go overboard and rewrite things when reacting to feedback).

I've put together a Claude Code Skill that does what I think is a reasonably good job at styles. Not as good as a style put together carefully by an expert like damnation, but better than 75% of human-generated styles we used to get as repository submissions:
https://github.com/adam3smith/csl-style-generation

It does download a fair amount of stuff to do this well and has some dependencies a non-technical user won't have installed (like node.js) (and, of course, you can only use Claude Code with API credits or a Pro or above subscription). Once set up, it will:
Take a style guide as input and then
1. Find a close match to an existing style as a starting point as we would when starting a new style
2. Make sure the style validates against the strict version of the CSL schema used for the repository
3. Test and improve the style against a number of quality guidelines we review for on the repository
4. Build a test metadata set based on the styleguide and use citeproc-js, the same processor Zotero uses, to check that the style produces the exact citations in the styleguide.

The skill also has an update mode that instructs it to keep updates minimal to avoid some of the revision concerns damnation notes above.

tapatoga · 2026-10-01T18:34:55+00:00

Thanks for the replies. I only need styles for specific journals, not for university papers or theses, but journals are also sometimes very fussy about their citation style requirements.

So, I guess the more I know about CSL, the better I can make use of use AI tools for creating CSL-based citation styles.

@adamsmith: This looks like a very useful tool. So far, I don't have any Claude API credits or a Claude subscription because I am not a heavy user of Claude. But I might consider buying some credits just for this purpose. Can you give me a rough estimate of how many credits I would need for performing steps 1-4 for one citation style?

adamsmith · 2026-10-01T19:13:50+00:00

I run this on a subscription and it's very hard to estimate based on this. At least $10/style but that doesn't include caching, setup, etc.
My experience is that you very quickly go above the cost of a monthly subscription when buying API credits for Claude Code (same for Codex and similar harnesses).

We probably shouldn't turn this into a Claude forum, though, so that's as far as I'll take this discussion.