How does one know what is the current citation style of a document?

sharachchandra

I drafted and formatted a paper in Word several months ago using a style, but I forget what style it was. When I reopened it for editing and clicked on Zotero>Document Preferences, it pops up the prefs window in which one style is pre-selected, giving the impression that it was that style in which the document was formatted earlier. But when I test this, I find it is not so. The pre-selected style in this pop-up is simply the last style I chose when formatting ANY doc file. What gives? Where does zotero store info on how a particular document was last formatted?

adamsmith

If you had the style installed, it would show up and be selected. But if a document is formatted with a citation style that isn't installed, Document Preferences just reverts to the default (i.e. the last chosen style).
That's not ideal and we've discussed auto-downloading citation styles in such a case, but I don't think that's going to happen terribly soon.

How important is it for you to find out the exact citation style? It's possible, but it's a bit involved.

sharachchandra

I guess that is what is happening: my document seems to have been formatted using a style which is not currently showing up in the style list. So every time I open this file (I am not saving it each time), it seems to default to a different style!

I tried 'reveal codes' to see if the style name was visible in the field codes, but it is not. Surely there is some simple way of getting at the name of the style used last time for formatting this doc?

adamsmith

As I said

How important is it for you to find out the exact citation style? It's possible, but it's a bit involved.

Specifically it involves opening the .docx with a package manager, then searching for the style in an individual xml component of that.
For a .doc file I actually am not sure how to do this.

sharachchandra

it is fairly important (especially for the future!). I am able to open the .docx package, and view the individual xml files in a viewer. I see zotero citation details in the main file (document.xml). So now where would I find the details of the style chosen?

adamsmith

it's in /docProps/custom.xml
should be pretty obvious there, otherwise search for http://www.zotero.org/styles

sharachchandra

Found it. It was indeed a style that is not in my zotero repository (must have been formatted by my collaborator). Thanks for the help.

damnation

Alternatively, could one not just download all styles and then see what Zotero picks?

adamsmith

But then you'd have to sift through 1300 styles every time you want to choose one in a new document... or I suppose since styles in documents can include dependents, more like 8000 styles. Doesn't seem like a good idea.