Upgrade Storagestandard format in use by American university presses in the humanities
I've spent several hours sorting through the documentation and forums, going through your list of citation styles, using the preview pane, and experimenting with various packaged styles.I haave found nothing at all that conforms to the standard format in use, say, by Yale University Press, or U Penn Press, or Penn State Press, etc. for scholarly books in any humanities field, i.e. books where both short-form endnotes and full citation bibliography are required. Not MLA, and none of the listed 'Chicago' styles.
In a book with endnotes and a bibliography, the proper format is:
For an endnote:
last name of author date, page no. (sometimes name, date, page no.)
AND the bibliography must look like:
Last name,first name. date. Italicized Title for a book. Place. [sometimes (Place: Publisher)}.
Last n, first n. date. "article title." Journal name no:xxx-xxx
with variations for different sorts of publications
Your styles coming closest to this format either have parentheses in the endnote (I've never seen this used in decades of scholarly practice and academic publishing!). If no parentheses, then the bibliography style doesn't have the date in the right place.
If I have manually to remove parentheses in each endnote with my wordprocessor, or manually put the date in the correct place in the bibliography, I might as well do each endnote manually, and find a way to generate a bibliography (maybe compiling it the old-fashioned way).
Is there an EASY way to format to the style I need? (I'm not going to bother with codes etc. -- it's easier just to put in all references manually the old-fashioned way.)
I recommend actually looking at a book in literature, history, art history, cultural studies, etc that has been published by an American university press in the last decade. Look at the Endnote/ bibliography styles. Forget the silly style manuals, MLA, Chicago.
It's very frustrating to have collected an enormous zotero library (which I love) only to find that the your citation styles make the word-integration aspect impossible to use.
In a book with endnotes and a bibliography, the proper format is:
For an endnote:
last name of author date, page no. (sometimes name, date, page no.)
AND the bibliography must look like:
Last name,first name. date. Italicized Title for a book. Place. [sometimes (Place: Publisher)}.
Last n, first n. date. "article title." Journal name no:xxx-xxx
with variations for different sorts of publications
Your styles coming closest to this format either have parentheses in the endnote (I've never seen this used in decades of scholarly practice and academic publishing!). If no parentheses, then the bibliography style doesn't have the date in the right place.
If I have manually to remove parentheses in each endnote with my wordprocessor, or manually put the date in the correct place in the bibliography, I might as well do each endnote manually, and find a way to generate a bibliography (maybe compiling it the old-fashioned way).
Is there an EASY way to format to the style I need? (I'm not going to bother with codes etc. -- it's easier just to put in all references manually the old-fashioned way.)
I recommend actually looking at a book in literature, history, art history, cultural studies, etc that has been published by an American university press in the last decade. Look at the Endnote/ bibliography styles. Forget the silly style manuals, MLA, Chicago.
It's very frustrating to have collected an enormous zotero library (which I love) only to find that the your citation styles make the word-integration aspect impossible to use.
What you describe, best as I can tell without actual examples, is close to the "dated note" version of the Chicago style - have a look and see if that works for you, but it doesn't put the date where you want it.
There is no easy way to format citation styles, no.
If you have an actual documented style guide, there's also the option of requesting styles.
https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/wiki/Requesting-Styles
No one has ever requested the style you're describing.
"For matters of style, including capitalization, abbreviation, notes, and bibliography, consult The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. Spelling, hyphenation, and punctuation should follow American rather than British rules. The Press follows Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed."
http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/submissions.asp#style
So it appears Chicago is still the standard.
And if the styles are that common, surely there must be journals using them that have author guidelines?
"In general, the Press follows the Chicago Manual of Style (15th edition) and the first spellings and hyphenation in Webster's Third New International Dictionary or Webster's Tenth New Collegiate Dictionary. Please tell us about any stylistic preferences you have: for example, spelling idiosyncratic to the work; field-specific abbreviations, conventions, and terminology used; the style guide followed for the notes and bibliography (MLA, Chicago Manual of Style, the Harvard Bluebook, APA, "Art Bulletin Style Guide")."
http://www.psupress.org/author/author_guidelines.html
I'd be happy to look at the pdfs you made from the books and compare them to Chicago guidelines. (elena.razlogova [at] gmail [dot] com)
So it comes down to making a choice between manually removing all the parentheses in hundreds of endnotes; or manually reformatting a huge bibliography after it is generated. This is something I would like to avoid.
Chicago is given as a standard so that a Press doesn't have to list how to cite each and every specific type of source, from the Bible to a Ph.D. thesis, website, or film. It is not, apparently, a straitjacket.
As long as I'm posting here: I would be grateful if there is information in Zotero documentation about how to create complex discursive end (or foot)notes. In other words: a reference followed by a comment or discussion, and then another reference, and so forth. In searching through the documentation, I came across an instruction not to use the word-processor to edit the note. But in the "edit citation" function, I could not find a way to introduce text into the note. I just want to make sure that if I were to use the word-processor or "show editor" window, the discursive text would not be lost in a reformat/ refresh operation.
The same question applies long- or full-form notes (where there is no bibliography provided) in which adjustments have to be made in the formatting of source (e.g., multi-volume series, conference volumes etc., don't always come out right automatically). It's not reasonable to expect that the Zotero program will format every source in every language in exactly the way one wants. So do you edit with the word-processor, the "show editor window", or, if in "edit citation," then how?
The author - date form of the short note in Chicago is, to make something up: Kupfer 2011:xxx-xxx. But what if one wanted Kupfer 2011, xxx-xxx or Kupfer, 2011, pp. xx-xx, then what to do?
Going back to Adam's latest post: It may not be an instruction to authors making submissions or preparing accepted mss. It's happened in the past that a copy-editor has come back to me with a request to use a particular bibliography format (author. date. Title etc), and of course, endnotes have no (parentheses). I thought this time around I'd set it up that way. Now, it's true, a copy editor or designer might request a format other than what one has submitted -- hopefully, if the bibliography is in a separate file, Zotero can simply regenerate it according to spec without having the notes in the same file, or without having to reformat all the notes.
Citation practices/ styles are probably the "last frontier" for computer reference managers. So many of them, so many fields, house styles, journal styles...
The style I've tried to find in the last couple of days is not a journal style. I've seen it, used it only in books.
http://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_usage#using_multiple_sources_in_a_citation
the examples are from parenthetical citations, but apply to footnotes as well.
You can use "show editor" in the word plugin to fix citations as well as complex footnotes, but the problem is that those citations won't update anymore: they won't reflect changes in the citation style or in the item data (the footnote/endnote count is done by Word, so that will still update).
Since I'm doing this in my free time and free of charge, I put a priority on stuff that's widely useful. My rule of thumb is that I will try to help code any style that a publisher (journal or book) or a University requires. I don't have the time to code for departmental requirements or personal taste. Since, afaik, there is currently no one but me volunteering style development that means if you can't point to requirements you're on your own. You can either do it manually, try coding the style yourself, or pay someone to do that. For Zotero purposes these are three different citation styles. The modifications are minor and quick to do, but it's still a different citation style (we have separate styles in the repository for much smaller reasons, such as a space after a semicolon or the number of authors before et al).
The question remains, though - if it's not a requirement, why does it make a difference?