generate & install Harvard style (Cite them Right)

knaxgurke
Hi,

I know it may be just me, but I can't seem to get it working and it's driving me nuts. All the Harvard referencing styles don't seem to be the one laid out in the book Cite them Right, which we are supposed to follow (and I thought Harvard was reffering to one fixed system...)
The closest thing I could find was the "harvard-limerick" one, which I thus altered (using the CSL editor) so it at least fit the general journal requirements (not the requirements for books etc. though, unfortunately), however I can't seem to install it. I've saved it as a .csl file and tried installing it through the + button and it does let me select the file, but then... it just ask "install style "" from filename.csl?" and if I click yes nothing happens. When I installed the harvard-limerick style however it had an actual name between the "" that remain empty here and installation was no problem.

Can someone please help me out where I can either find a suitable style adhering to the Cite them Right-Harvard format (year in brackets, article title in '', journal/book titles in italics) or how I can install the altered limerick-style?

Thank you very much!
  • adamsmith
    even cite them right doesn't prescribe a clear uniform system. I'm not sure why UK universities are so fond of that book.

    The message you get suggests that your style may not have a title and/or ID specified.
    You can post the style code to gist.github.com (open the .csl with a text editor like Notepad or TextEdit) and we should be able to help you.
  • knaxgurke
    I think it's pretty straight forward, it says clearly when which punctuation or other formatting is required and haven't had any problems with it. Either way, I have to use it, so a discussion about it's usefullness is not really what I was looking for.

    Why not? I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with this stuff, but I basically just added a full stop after the et al., which, like I said, doesn't in fact get it that much closer to my university's requirements. I had actually hoped to be able to edit it a bit more to give me different formats for different literature, but when I started out with the orignially implemented Harvard Style I just couldn't figure out where to add what because it didn't make sense to me as it's not a straight forward for non-computer cracks as the "you can change it by simply altering it here" made it sound.
  • adamsmith
    Ah, I confused that - cite it right is the one without one clear standard:
    http://books.google.com/books/about/Cite_It_Right.html?id=soUq_P6STXkC
    cite them right http://paulbirddesign.comxa.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/cite_them_right.pdf
    does indeed follow one set of rules (Harvard, though, is a catch all term for author-date styles).

    I don't understand the second paragraph. If you want help getting your custom style into Zotero please follow my instructions to post it to gist.github.com as a public gist and provide the URL here.
  • knaxgurke
    This is the link https://gist.github.com/4684556, however what I was trying to say was that I don't know where or how I could edit it any more in order to come closer to the cite them right format.
  • adamsmith
    you saved the webpage rather than the style - which you'd have to copy & paste into a text editor to save.
    But why aren't you working with the visual editor
    http://editor.citationstyles.org/visualEditor/
    which makes all of this much easier, including saving a style.
  • knaxgurke
    I just did what it said in the instructions, editing in the CSL editor and then clicked on save.

    Thank you so much for that link, that's exactly what I needed! I can't believe I couldn't find anything like this in the actual instructions... It seems this has been a major life (or nerve ;)) saver, it's working just fine and much clearer to edit indeed.
  • adamsmith
    which instructions did you follow?
  • knaxgurke
    These http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/style_editing_step-by-step, however I just realised it does say to save in the text editor rather then the implemented saving function of the CSL editor, which I thought was there to, well, save the changes, obviously.
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