Editing a style to be documentary note rather than Harvard (author-date)

Pauline6246

We are trying to create our own reference style in Zotero. We will base it on the style of the University of Melbourne, which is close to our own. The problem is that our publications use both documentary note and author-date (Harvard) referencing whereas Uni of Melbourne only has a style for the latter. Can anyone tell us how we would adapt the Uni of Melbourne style to have superscript numbers for the in-text reference instead of author/s' names in parentheses?

adamsmith

so you mean something like:

Division of labor is awesome¹


-----
¹ Smith 1776
?

You'd change the class attribute in cs:style from in-text to note (i.e. change class="in-text" to class="note" in the 2nd line of the style). You'd then also remove the parentheses in the affixes of the layout element of cs:citation (so that you don't get (Smith 1776) in your footnote.

Pauline6246

Thanks adamsmith. I've made the change from class="in-text" to class-"note" but can't locate the appropriate affixes either in the code editor or the visual editor (I should have pointed out at the outset that I'm not very tech savvy).

adamsmith

find this
<layout prefix="(" suffix=")" delimiter="; ">

and change it to

<layout delimiter="; ">

Pauline6246

Unfortunately there's no bit of code matching that.

adamsmith

there is in the Melbourne Harvard style.

adamsmith

right here: https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/blob/master/harvard-the-university-of-melbourne.csl#L159
to be precise.

Pauline6246

Sorry, found it. But I swear that a moment ago a search for 'layout' brought up nothing...

Okay, I've gone in, made the change and it works. Hurray! The footnote doesn't have all the information I need but I'll play with that in Zotero and see if I can sort it out.

Thanks so much for your help.

Pauline6246

A day later and I realise that my footnote has the abbreviated reference that would formerly have appeared in the text rather than the complete citation. Is there a way to alter the code so that only the note identifier appears in the text but the full citation appears in the footnote? In other words I need not just 'Smith 1776' but 'Smith, P 1776, Easy coding solutions for novices,Zotero forums etc, etc'

adamsmith

it's certainly possible, but it requires writing all of that into the citation section. There are existing styles that do that - notably Chicago Manual, Modern Humanities Research Association, as well as a couple of legal styles, including AGLC - my best recommendation would be to use one of those (I really don't understand why so many Commonwealth universities feel it's a good use of anyone's time to have custom citation styles for every university...) or at least looking at them as a template.

Unfortunately, this is likely not going to be trivial, so you may have to find someone to help you. We can offer help with specific questions, but can't walk you through this step-by-step.

Pauline6246

In fact this is not a vanity exercise about creating a custom style; we are simply to find something that matches the recommendations of the Style manual for authors, editors and printers, which has been used widely in publishing in Australia since 1966. The Uni of Melbourne seems to follow it but only in its Harvard style dictates, which is why we were looking to adapt it for footnotes and endnotes. AGLC and Chicago order their citation elements differently; however, I'll take another look at those and others to see if I can find something that matches.