Help Needed: Modifying an existing style to fit need

kfhung

I looked at the available styles and did not see the journal that I want listed, so I followed the FAQ parts and tried to modify an existing one to fit my needs.

I started off with the National Library of Medicine one because it seems to be the closes to what I want.

I have successfully modified the journal articles entries to a format that I need, but I am having troubles in getting the book citations to appear as I need. Namely, I cannot get the editor and edition fields to show up.

The format that I am trying to get to is this:

Book
South J, Blass B (2001) The future of modern genomics. Blackwell, London


Book chapter
Brown B, Aaron M (2001) The politics of nature. In: Smith J (ed) The rise of modern genomics, 3rd edn. Wiley, New York, pp 230-257



Is there a place that I can find a code for this? If not, is there a place where I can post my code and get feedback? I am looking at my entry in the Zotero database and I don't even see a field called "editors." I see "authors" and "contributors."

I've already spent most of the day doing this and some help will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

adamsmith

For feedback, post your code to a pubic gist at
gist.github.com and post the URL here.
NLM (I'd suggest using Vancouver, which is better maintained but otherwise nearly identical, instead, but either way) style lists the editor, there is a problem in your database if it doesn't show editor.
You can change a contributor (who is never listed) to an editor by clicking on the little arrow to its left and selecting editor.

Edition is called using
<text variable="edition"/>
you can find sample code for this in many existing styles, e.g. Elsevier (with titles), which is also a variant of the Vancouver style.

kfhung

After checking out more into this, I think the problem I was having was due to mis-tagged fields.

I took a screen shot of my library:

https://picasaweb.google.com/kaifhung/ZoteroScreenshot?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCI787sanzdCxDQ&feat=directlink


As you can see, the data were listed as either Author or Contributor. What the database thinks is "author" is actually "editor". The "contributor" is the "author". So I tested it and when I manually changed the tag of the data the formatting worked.

All of the data that I had imported from RefWorks have this problem. I had RefWorks from my previous school, and when I left I exported the database. Then recently, I started using Zotero and I uploaded the database into it, and that's how the data look. So I will need to manually go back to each entry and change that for the formatting to work appropriately. I don't know if this is a known issue before or not.

So modifying the existing version of the Vancouver code is probably something I can do, now that I got the confusion over Contributor/Author/Editor resolved in the database.

Thanks for all the help.

adamsmith

A lot of the old commercial products produce non-standard compliant RIS output, so you're likely seeing a result of that. Not much Zotero can do about that. I believe in RIS authors should be A1 or AU and editors should be ED or A2 (you can open and manipulate the file with a text editor.