Custom citation format

In my beautiful French-speaking province of Québec, in Canada, bibliographies and citation formats can be an issue. Depending on the professor, the format required will be different in every class: my department doesn't use the same as the library which uses a different one from the research group where I work. And none of them are exactly like the ones that are available on Zotero, even if those are the main ones.

Would it be possible to make an option to customize the citation format, so I can make it exactly like I need it. That way I wouldn't have to correct every single entry for italics or a comma and get completely alienated in the process of doing so.
  • How I can use my custom citations format in the Zotero?
  • gandre — I've updated the Creating Citation Styles page to explain how to insert a custom CSL into the Zotero database.
  • edited February 25, 2007
    Hi all,
    sorry, I'm not good in this kind of things... I've tried to create my citation format, but I failed. Could someone, please, provide some example of a properly created, functional CSL file on which I would be able to learn ( CSL files for all the styles, which are already included in Zotero would be perfect)?
    Thank you in advance and sorry again for my incompetence.
    Greetings
    Alexandr
  • edited February 27, 2007
    Alexandr -- I'm the author of CSL. Sorry things aren't quite ready for you, but you can see a list of example styles here, and one specific example within it here.
  • Thank you very much, mr. D'Arcus.
    I've taken a look at those examples and I believe I'll be able to adapt them to my needs.
    Greetings
    Alexandr
  • Where can I obtain the CSL file used by Zotero for citations using author-date style CMS?
  • @turkeyphant -- what is "CMS"?

    All of the CSL styles I am aware are at the link I reference above. There are a few author-date styles there, including Harvard, APA, and a couple/few others IIRC.
  • Chicago Manual of Style. I was referring to the citation style called "Chicago Manual of Style (Author-Date)" in Zotero.
  • edited March 11, 2007
    @turkeyphant - I don't know myself, since it's not in my repository. One of the Zotero guys is working on building up the number of styles in the short-run, so perhaps we can sort that out in the process. Clearly this style is an important one.
  • The style is in the scrapers.sql file:
    https://www.zotero.org/trac/browser/extension/branches/1.0/scrapers.sql
    But the URLs that it gives for the canonical locations are all 404s.
  • Hmm ... thanks.

    This reminds me of the need to sort out details of infrastructure sooner rather than later. Putting the CSL files as strings in the SQL schema ain't very scalable. Really we need a scalable, distributed, and URI-based style system here. I've based CSL on that idea with borrowing aspects of Atom's metadata model (including the URI-based id element), but we need to take the next step to make it happen.
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