Cell csl-style using semicolon as delimeter instead of colon

cheflo
In [the Cell csl style](https://www.zotero.org/styles/cell) the delimeter is specified as semicolon instead of colon, which is what the journal [Cell actually uses](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867415010284). When I am using the Cell style with Zotero + LibreOffice this is not a problem and the delimeter in the document is actually ','. However, when I dowload the style and use it with Pandoc, the delimeter becomes ';'. I am changing it manually for now, but maybe the style should be updated or is there any reason for having it as semicolon?
  • cheflo
    From that article I also noticed that they seem to separate two authors with 'and' now. Nothing I am especially found of...
  • adamsmith
    sorry, which delimiter are you referring to? Between two citations I'm seeing a semicolon both in the article and in the style on the repository.
  • cheflo
    Sorry for the late reply, the email notification went to spam.

    Where do you see the semicolon in the article? I see a colon separating in-text citations. For example, in this sentence:

    "Whether melanomas similarly express abnormal levels of COX-2 remains unclear (Becker et al., 2009, Denkert et al., 2001, Goulet et al., 2003 and Kuźbicki et al., 2006)"


    Here is another example article http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(15)00830-2

    "Some motifs involved in circadian regulation, including E-box, D-box, and Rev-responsive elements (RREs) (Bozek et al., 2009, Bozek et al., 2010, Ukai and Ueda, 2010)..."
  • adamsmith
    are you looking at the HTML view? The correct style is in the PDF (which corresponds to the printed article) and there the first citation you excerpt is: "...unclear (Becker et al., 2009; Denkert et al., 2001; Goulet et al., 2003; Kuzbicki et al., 2006)."
    The HTMLs are auto-generated, the citation formatted for those are all over the place.


    (just to avoid miscommunication--when you say "colon" you mean comma, though, right? : is a colon.)
  • cheflo
    Yes, I meant 'comma' (,), sorry. And I was looking at the HTML version. It didn't strike me as possible that they would only use the correct citation format in the pdf. Not sure why they don't pay more attention to that, but I will use the pdfs as a reference in the future.

    I also noticed that the zotero + libreoffice citations were a mix of incorrectly formatted citations pasted from elsewhere and the correct cell-format citations generated from zotero.

    So there was plenty of human error all over the place, but now all issues are resolved. Thanks for the help!
  • Gregsmith80
    Sorry for digging up this old thread but I also stumbled over that strange in- text citation habit of CELL.
    I contacted them and asked why HTML is that flawed and they told me that is due to the differente handling of certain elements by the different platforms where the papers appear.
    I.e. citation elements tagged in HTML produce sometimes a different appearance of these elements in HTML than in a PDF. This means that semicolons are displayed by some platforms as commas finally....

    I also wonder why they seem to be so careless in that matter and also why the authors do not complain.
    Cell seems to say :"yes sorry we know but thats a technical problem we can not cope with"
    I mean a journal that big should do better in that regard and all the other journals are getting it done also.
  • Gregsmith80
    What do you think about this zotero community?
  • adamsmith
    I'm not surprised, to be honest, but there's really nothing for us to do. Our style is correct, which is really all we can do from our end. I could fill a book with all the awful things academic publishers are (and aren't) doing with HTML.
  • Gregsmith80
    There are two things that do not get into my mind:
    1) Neither Cell seems to be interested in fixing this, for what reason ever.
    2) not the authors seem to complain about that (at least I guess they don't otherwise cell would have taken action think).

    So...one of the most important journals does not get it done to implement their own citation standards. It's a joke.....
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