Help needed on custom citation style

Hello everyone,

I have just learned today that Zotero has a Word plugin. I am just starting to type my thesis, so this is wonderful news to me. I was going to be forced to do it in Latex, as the sheer amount of references would have created a living nightmare to do by hand, but now I can do it in my preferred environment! Yaaaay!

However, as Word is not the greatest in handling huge documents, I was thinking of separating off the chapters into individual files, creating customized reference markers such as [I.1], [I.2], for chapter I, then e.g. [IV.1], [IV.2], etc for chapter IV. Any ideas how to do this without doing a find+replace combo just before printing it?

Thx,
Janos
  • You'd need e.g. four different reference styles.
  • Hmmm, typical case of RTFM, sorry about that (all info @ http://www.zotero.org/support/csl_simple_edits).

    I'll paste the HOWTO here anyway:

    The goal is to create a .csl file for every chapter, that will change IEEE's default [1], [2], etc. format into [I.1], [I.2], etc, in both the citation and bibliography sections.

    1. open new tab in Firefox, type: chrome://zotero/content/tools/csledit.xul
    2. Select IEEE in the toolbar (righternmost dropdown menu)

    1. in the citation sector, find and change:
    <layout prefix="[" suffix="]" delimiter="], [">
    to
    <layout prefix="[I." suffix="]" delimiter="], [">

    2. in the bibliography sector, find and change:
    <text variable="citation-number" prefix="[" suffix="]"/>
    to
    <text variable="citation-number" prefix="[I." suffix="]"/>


    Then I changed
    <title>IEEE</title>
    <id>http://www.zotero.org/styles/ieee</id>;
    to
    <title>blackjancsi's IEEE chapter I</title>
    <id>http://www.zotero.org/styles/bj_ieee_chI</id>;

    then ctrl-a, copy the whole code into notepad, save to whatever filename you please, then rename it to have .csl extension (if you cannot see the file extension, e.g. readme.txt, then read up here: http://www.fileinfo.com/help/windows-show-extensions.html ) , then drop into any Firefox window and click install.

    VoilĂ .

    If you entered one that you need to change later on, no problem: "Styles can also be added via the Style Manager found on the Styles tab in the Zotero preferences window (the Style Manager also allows you to delete installed styles)."

    Sorry again for being a Noob!
  • no need to apologize. That's quite impressive on the uptake for a noob!
  • However, as Word is not the greatest in handling huge documents ...
    While I don't use Word, the above is not true. Word has no problem at all dealing with a 500 page thesis. Just learn how to use the outline mode to manage it, and make sure you keep regular backups.
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