Modifying Styles

A_Hartmann

I am working as researcher (psychologist) at a medical department at the University of Freiburg Germany. For publications we need styles, slightly different form the ones listed on the Zotero-pages. Our decision to switch to Zotero as our standard reference software depends very much on the availability of correct styles and/or a tool for modification of styles.

It would be very helpful to have an editor for styles (and a documentation) enabling to duplicate a style and to modify the copy.
Is such a tool anywhere out there? Can anybody help?

Tjowens

There are currently two tools for editing CSLs. Zotero comes with a tool for live preview of edits to CSL files. If you paste chrome://zotero/content/tools/csledit.xul into your location bar you can see this tool. You can use this tool to load up existing styles and see how changes to the style file would impact the citations of selected items in your collections. For more information on using this feature search through the forums for CSLedit.

The other tool, the style generator, is a tool for creating styles from scratch. You can give it a try here.

One of these tools may fit your needs.

Note, there is currently a much more robust style generator under development. I am not sure when it will be released.

neocortical

Hi,
Thanks for pointing to the CSLedit tool. I used it to modify a style (the Cell journal dev style), saved the edited version as a .csl file, and opened this file in Firefox. Can you tell me how to apply this style to the word plugin? The changes I made don't appear in a word file...
Thanks,
Matt

dstillman

Did Zotero prompt you to install the .csl file when you dragged it in?

asplundj

Try choosing a different style in word and then turn back to the correct one

adamsmith

also remember that you want to change the name of your style before saving it (if only to be able to recognize it. That refers to this line in the .csl output:
<title>American Medical Association</title>

neocortical

Thanks, all. Choosing a different style and switching back in Word did the trick. Thanks asplundj!
I will now attempt to upload my fixed version of the Cell style to the style repository...