SBLHS - does zotero create footnotes/bibliographies accurately? Opinions sought please

Mike Forward · December 13, 2014

I have, in my enthusiasm for zotero as a brand new user,(perhaps naively?) sent out a course-wide email recommending zotero as a powerful research tool at my theological college in the UK, one which requires the use of "The SBL Handbook of Style (SBLHS)".

Unfortunately, I have had a less than enthusiastic initial response about the use of zotero from my college tutors, with claims that it fails to correctly reproduce precisely the required footnote/bibliography formats.

I would GREATLY value feedback from users more experienced than myself as to the validity of their scepticism (comments from zotero expert moderators especially welcomed)

I plan to invest hugely in the use zotero for years to come in my studies, but if it is fatally flawed in the area of citations, I don't even want to venture down this route, if it risks being a dead-end!

Many thanks. Apologies if I've started a new discussion when I shouldn't have. I'm not very forum-savvy!

zuphilip · December 13, 2014

I can try to give you some background information: The citation styles in zotero are written in CSL, the Citation Style Language, which are also used by many other reference management systems. We have currently over 7.200 citation styles and all work is done by crowdsourcing from some volunteers.

If you, your tutors, or your students find errors in the implementation of the SBLHS citation style, then please report them in the forum here. We will correct these errors in the repository and the update mechanism makes sure, that everybody is "shipped out" the new version.

There are some technical limitations (as always) but they are only a problem for very rare and special needs. I implented for example the style for the Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche and I think everything was possible to implement except some idem rule and non-standard abbreviations like "Th." for Thomas.

Maybe, adamsmith can say more about the specific style for SBLHS.

adamsmith · December 13, 2014

SBL is used by a fair amount of people, including a sizeable contingent of biblical scholars, so I'm pretty confident about it. Zotero doesn't really work for biblical commentaries, so you do need to either hack those or do them by hand entirely, but for regular scholarly literature, the style should be flawless provided data is input completely and correctly.