Consequences of citation style modification

pbsociety

Hello,


I would like to find out what are the consequences of modifying particular citation style, e.g. Chicago, in the light of interacting with indexing services (e.g. Web of Science). Are there any? I mean some small corrections, such as the placement of full stops or quotation marks.

Thanks,
Peter

adamsmith

you would have to ask them - it's not like WoS relies on open source algorithms - but I'd be highly surprised if they parsed citation styles. I figure they use DOIs and similar identifiers to link citations.

On the other hand, as a scientist and as someone who works on automating citations, I would implore you not to use "slightly modified" versions of existing standards like CMoS unless you have a very compelling reason to do so. Why add yet another completely useless variation on a theme to the existing hundreds of citation styles?

DWL-SDCA

If you change a style's formatting you are doing _ nothing_ to the site translators that you use to bring things into Zotero. It should have no effect whatsoever.

That said, I wholly agree with adamsmith's comment about changing a standard citation style on a whim. If a slightly different style is required, please tell fourm readers why. There are many more citation styles available beyond the ones that were downloaded with Zotero. Please see the Zotero style repository. It holds many more styles including the styles needed for hundreds of journals and publishers. If the style is required by some standard entity, you may find what you need has already been created.

Read more about styles here:
http://www.zotero.org/support/styles

pbsociety

Well, this follows the tradition (you don't have to follow English-like formatting style everywhere). For example not to put full stop before quotation mark, but rather after it, not to use “” but rather „”.
Moving a single sign may result in alterations during citations parsing. I don't even need extra citation style in Zotero's repository (I could accept manuscripts having references formatted with, e.g. Chicago style), because any modifications to the references could be done later during editorial process, but I was just wondering whether anyone has a knowledge about parsing citations from articles (with this "slightly modified" standard citation style) by indexing services (I mean some main services). DOIs (or any other IDs) are not always assigned to a bibliographic item (or to a published paper), yet indexing services are able to evaluate such "unmarked" items as well. I don't think they do it manually.