Creating Ante-Nicene Fathers and other unique citations

dmclaurin
Greetings all,

I have recently modified the Society of Biblical Literature style for myself because, for example, my institution requires us to do some things slightly differently than SBL 2. Mostly I use a visual editor to make most of my changes and that has worked fine for the time being.

However, there are certain unique citations (e.g. Ante-Nicene Fathers) that I need to cite and I cannot find a way to create a citation type (e.g. book, book section) with the visual editors that I use. I do not have the coding ability to create a type.

Also, I would be too afraid without some sort of help with this. So, essentially, my question is this: Is there a way to create citation types from scratch? And if so, how?
  • bwiernik
    It's not possible to create custom item types. What exactly is the citation format you are looking for? And what is wrong with, e.g., using Book or Book Section?
  • dmclaurin
    Unless I am missing something about inputting these items into Zotero (which is entirely possible) I do not think creating the footnote and bibliography for this item in SBL is possible.

    For example, If I want to quote from Augustine's letters. SBL says it has to be this.

    Augustine, Letters of St. Augustine (in italics) 28.3.5 (NPNF1 1:252).

    The bibliography should look like this:

    Augustine. The Letters of St. Augustine. (italics) In vol. 1 of The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, (italics) Series 1. Edited by Philip Schaff. 1886–1889. 14 vols. Repr., Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994.

    The problem isn't so much the bibliography, but the footnote. Thoughts?
  • bwiernik
    So compared to citing a book chapter normally, you don’t want it to include the editor, want the title in italics, and want the title of the container (NPNF) to be in parentheses, abbreviated, and without “In”?

    What is 28.3.5 here? Is 1:252 a locator (section and page, etc.)? If not, what is it?

    Is it only this specific book (NPNF) or a whole class of books (e.g., classics generally)?
  • adamsmith
    I have "classical" texts as one of the things we need to do better with, but that's not going to happen any time soon. It may be possible to find a hack of sorts, but given the fact that you want a book/chapter type entry in the reference list and something very specific in the footnote, I'm not super optimistic.
  • dmclaurin
    Thank you for taking time to answer.
  • bwiernik
    Looking at your needs here, I would recommend hacking the report type for this source.
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