Journal of Value Inquiry Style Error

Jdelston

1. I imported the Journal of Value Inquiry citation style and the result is very wrong. Instead of endnote citations, the setting just inputs bracketed numbers. The citations themselves are nowhere to be found. Does anyone know why this is?
2. Why can't I just modify citation styles myself like EndNote? Zotero makes me completely powerless when I can't find an exact citation style to import. Suppose I find a near match. Fixing it would require endless manual changes. My entire library of citations becomes useless when I am submitting to a journal with a citation style I can't find.

noksagt

Have you inserted the bibliography?

https://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_usage#inserting_and_editing_the_bibliography

adamsmith

And you can edit citation styles:
https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/style_editing_step-by-step

Jdelston

Thank you! I can insert the bibliography, but that violates their citation style. They want the full bibliographic information given in the footnote. Here are their instructions:
All references should be made in notes that appear as endnotes in a final section titled Notes. In the body of the text, the note numbers are to be superscripted and placed at the end of a sentence with only one note number per sentence. In the Notes section, the note numbers are to be kept as regular, full-sized numbers, not superscripted and followed by a period, with the body of the note indented as a block. Full bibliographic information should be given with “See” used for references that are not for quotes. Please reserve endnotes for citation only, and avoid discussion in endnotes.
“Ibid.” and “op. cit.” should be used where appropriate:
Michael Slote, Morals from Motives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 24.
Ibid., p. 45.
See S. Mathew Liao, “The Idea of a Duty to Love,” The Journal of Value Inquiry, Vol. 40, No. 1, (2006).
John Rawls, “Social Unity and Primary Goods,” in Samuel Freeman, ed., Collected Papers (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 362.
See Slote, op. cit., pp. 136-139."

Jdelston

I didn't know you could edit styles! Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with html and the instructions don't address the problem I'm having.

adamsmith

yeah, we just have the completely wrong citation style there based on information that Springer gave us. I don't think we have that exact one (again, it's a Chicago variant, but not an exact match).

Jdelston

Such a shame given the journal's ranking in philosophy. Is there any chance of it being fixed? In the meantime, I'll be sending my article in with Chicago. However, it makes me realize that Zotero is not a longterm solution for me. Unless you're a coder or belong to a field with a more complete set of journal add ins, Zotero is really, truly useless.

adamsmith

(again, though: while I'll readily agree that it could be easier to create or modify citation styles, there's a visual editor and you certainly don't have to be a coder to do so: http://editor.citationstyles.org/visualEditor/ )

Jdelston

The idea that you could use the visual editor without having a degree in coding is a joke. Even my husband, who really is a coder, could not figure out how to a) get rid of inline citations in favor of footnotes or b) add a period to an author's initial. I honestly don't understand how it's possible to use Zotero if they don't already have the journal you need (and of course they have virtually none in Philosophy). Creating a style also doesn't help because it requires that you start with inline citations.

adamsmith

I'm sorry it doesn't work for you -- let me know if you'd like specific pointers on those two questions.

Jdelston

Yes, though at this point I need the Bioethics style and not Journal of Value Inquiry. I will take any advice you can give me. Is there nobody who creates Zotero styles for badly needed journals? I am, after all, paying for this service. What do people do in my situation? Do they just switch to Mendeley?

bwiernik

(Please remember that the people helping you here are volunteers and are the leading contributors to the CSL citation styles that both Zotero and Mendeley, among other software, use to format citations. There are literally thousands of journals with unique citation styles for which custom CSL styles could be made. We do our best to keep up, but there is only so much time that anyone can devote to writing new styles, and there is a large backlog. Zotero and Mendeley are both free software and have much better citation formatting than the major paid alternatives. We are happy to help you troubleshoot your specific issues, but please try to avoid gross overgeneralizations.)

adamsmith

What bwiernik says about the citation styles -- so switching to Mendeley wouldn't do anything at all here; they use the exact same set of styles. I'd add that you're paying specifically for Zotero File Storage, which isn't necessary to use Zotero, which is completely free and open source software.

For the two specific issues you mentioned:
1) Swichting a style from in-text to note: Click on "Global Formatting Options" on the left, then under "Class" switch fron "in-text" to "note"
2) Switching first names from full first name to initial:
- Click on the author name on the top right
- On the left, you'll see new nodes that have now expanded.
- Click on "Name" (singular)
- Find "Initialize with", click "enable", then add a period or a period with a space into the field.

Jdelston

Thank you. Those two instructions worked, but I wasn't able to do anything else because the visual editor instructions are only for 2 or 3 things and my comp sci brother in law couldn't even figure out how to move the date or get rid of parentheses. Additionally, the visual editor crashed after every change I made. Also, the style search didn't work because it required that I use inline citations and a bibliography to do the search, neither of which my chosen style allow for. I chose Chicago Manual of Style full note because that's the only style I could find with notes instead of inline citations (even though I know how to change in line to note, but it still doesn't help when you're doing the search) but it still used a bibliography. That meant every author listing started with last name instead of with first name like I need it, because bibliographies are alphabetized but footnotes aren't. Also, my style guide didn't have the same features as your examples like number of authors, so I had no way of entering in a single correct citation because I had to make things up for what my style would want with your citation example features. Is there any way for you to request the citation style directly from the journals rather than have each individual Zotero user learn how to use the visual editor? For example, if you asked Bioethics, would they have a CSL style that they could either send or write? Or could I talk on the phone with someone who has more experience with these matters? My university library is not familiar with the visual editor.

adamsmith

We try to get people who modify styles for themselves to get them to us -- which is how we got to the 1200 or so different styles we have now, with more than 150 different contributors over the last 12 months -- and we'd certainly be very happy for journals to give us CSL styles. There's a small number of journals that have done so. Maybe 30 or so overall?
But we have absolutely no leverage with journals -- the editors are your colleagues, they want you to submit manuscripts, so you're in the best position to request this.

Chicago Style, btw. has both a footnote and a bibliography listing for every item and since you're not interested in the bibliography, you can just ignore it and work on the footnotes only (which, e.g., have authors in the correct format already.

Jdelston

Ok, thank you. Sounds like I should just do my footnotes by hand as 3 people in my family really tried to modify the style ourselves and couldn't do it.

Rintze

Is there nobody who creates Zotero styles for badly needed journals? I am, after all, paying for this service. What do people do in my situation?

Well, you have three main options:

* Follow the instructions at https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/wiki/Requesting-Styles to post a style request, and hope that somebody fulfills your request. This can take months, though, or your request might be ignored completely, as there is only a handful of other users that ever fulfill such requests.
* Pay somebody. Some users around here, in particular @adamsmith, have coded styles for a fee. Some styles can require quite a bit of time to code, though, even for somebody familiar with CSL, so this isn't necessarily cheap ($150-250 is not uncommon for complex styles), but usually you can get a fast 1-2 week turnaround.
* Code the style yourself. As you've discovered though, making (substantial) changes to CSL styles isn't exactly trivial, and it does take quite a bit of study to become fluent in CSL. Obviously this hasn't scared away everybody (we have quite a few contributors), but it's indeed daunting for most. There are unfortunately some useful features of CSL styles that make it difficult to create an easy-to-use editor (the visual editor helps a little, but it's still not very straightforward). And citation formats are often complex.

Ultimately, though, the best long-term solution is to lobby with journals and publishers to standardize on fewer styles. The only reason CSL exists is that there are some many, often small, variations of citation formats out in the wild. (and with tens of thousands of journals, every author has their own badly needed style)

Jdelston

Rintze-- Thank you so much for your reply!
1. I did post a style request, but I've never had a style request of mine fulfilled
2. I did not know I could pay someone! That's a great idea, but unfortunately my timeline is so close that I don't think I have time for someone to complete it by next week.
3. I really, really tried to code the style myself. So did my partner and so did my brother in law. Combined, we spent many hours trying to make the most basic changes. There just aren't enough detailed instructions for each of the many changes I'd need to make to the starting style and none of the instructions that are available are generalizable to other issues. I was only able to make a change when @adamsmith generously gave me specific instructions for the problem, and then the instructions he gave me were not enough to move on to the next problem by myself. I would gladly take a class on how to create my own style, or read a detailed manual, but I don't see that any exist.
4. I am truly appalled at the lack of standardized reference styles in my field. It would be one thing not to standardize around 1 particular style and have some journals use APA, others Chicago, and others MLA. But in my field, each journal comes up with their own unique style for reasons beyond comprehension. And, of course, they do not then create downloadable styles themselves for their authors to use in Zotero/Mendeley/End Note etc.. But I am just not in a position to lobby with them to change their ways. I am asking to be published and therefore not in a position to negotiate. Believe me, I'd gladly do so if I could!

damnation

Hey @adamsmith and @Rintze
How do I go about this style? Just use a chicago style to base it on and we then replace the dependent style stub with the new chicago-based style on github?

adamsmith

since they're in different folders, you'd delete the dependent style entirely and add the independent style as if it were a new one.
We can then show you how to also add an exception in the automatically generated Springer data, but that doesn't have to happen at exactly the same time -- we'll just do this and link to it from the relevant PR so you can see an example.

Rintze

since they're in different folders, you'd delete the dependent style entirely and add the independent style as if it were a new one.

(You can do this in a single pull request while relying entirely on the GitHub web interface, by the way. First you create the pull request, either by deleting the dependent style or adding the independent style, and then you can go to the branch in your fork that was created for the pull request and make the other change in a second commit. We can show you how to do the second step if you need help.)

damnation

@Jdelston
Check out the style on the repository https://www.zotero.org/styles?q=id:the-journal-of-value-inquiry