Renaming a citation style

kevinwilson

Hi,

I've added the Harvard (Cite Them Right) style to my list of styles as it's exactly the same as my institution uses. Rather than suggesting students use Harvard (Cite Them Right), is there a way of renaming or copying this style so we can name it Harvard (my institution name) so it's more obvious to students which style to use?

Also, how can I edit from either Firefox/Standalone the citation styles available to me? I would only want the options of the citation styles we used at my institution - removing some of the defaults would be useful.

Thanks,
Kevin

Rintze

We typically only create citation styles for institutions when they have officially documented (in print or online) which citation style they use. Does anything of the sort exist?

kevinwilson

Thanks for your reply, Rintze. We have out guidance on referencing here - http://www.gold.ac.uk/library/research-referencing-skills/. It shows the citation styles we use, with examples of how we suggest Harvard, Chicago, etc be used (they are really just taken from Pears and Shields, 'Cite Them Right').

The variations on Harvard et al we use will already be on Zotero as citation styles created by other universities, so there's no point us creating them. I thought there might be a way of copying and renaming someone else's style for our students benefit.

We don't use AAA, Cell, Nature or Vancouver, so hoped there was a way of removing these as citation options for us too.

Rintze

CSL supports "dependent" styles, which make it relatively straightforward to make styles like Chicago available under another name (see http://citationstyles.org/downloads/specification.html#dependent-styles ). But if your university uses a wide range of standard citation formats, it doesn't really make sense for us to host a dependent style for each of them for your university.

You can of course host such CSL styles yourself on your own website, and we can tell you how to rename the styles. There isn't an easy way to change the default set of citation styles that come pre-installed with Zotero, but you can easily delete individual styles via the Styles tab in the Zotero preferences (see https://www.zotero.org/support/preferences/cite ).

adamsmith

As for removing/adding styles - this wouldn't be hard to do on your campus computers - you'd just have to add/remove the respective files from the styles folder in the Zotero data directory. With good IT people that could just be part of the install script. But for students installing Zotero themselves there's really no way.

For the renamed style(s) - what Rintze says: i.e. we'd be happy to add one dependent style - "Harvard - Goldsmiths" - you shouldn't have a disadvantage over other schools who are foolish enough to make up their own citation style - but not "Goldsmiths" styles for Chicago, APA etc. Let us know if that'd be useful

aurimas

Technically, the university could fairly easily distribute a custom Zotero package (for Firefox, not so much Standalone), where different styles are included. You just have to unpack the .xpi file, change the styles, zip it back up, and rename to have the .xpi extension. I think that would even continue to automatically update via zotero.org, but you would obviously want to keep the package reasonably up to date anyway.

dstillman

(Technically, the university cannot distribute a custom Zotero package and call it "Zotero". They could distribute a Firefox extension that updated the styles in Zotero, though, and that could include installing a custom style.)