Advice on referencing and styling

edited January 21, 2019
Hi, I could use advice re referencing workflow.

I'm writing a 10k+ article and at first draft stage, with bulk of paper done but a few more sections to add.

Hope this isn't too crazy but at this first stage, I've referenced using filepaths on my local computer to quickly track articles.

I think the next stage is to create a Zotero library of all properly referenced articles. I would like to use numerical citations in the article ie Vancouver syle with superscript [1,2,3]

My question is - is it possible to 'Cite While I Write' using Zotero and LibreOffice or Word and would this auto-update if I add an intervening paragraph and references?

  • Yes, you can use Zotero with the Word or Libreoffice plug-ins to cite while you write in those word processors.

    Yes, Zotero will take care of re-numbering the citations as you move text around or insert/delete citations. Zotero will also let you switch citation styles with the click of a button.

    Zotero can do a LOT more! If you have PDFs of these articles, you can drag-drop them in to Zotero and it will try to grab the metadata. This works well in most cases, but even then, the highest quality metadata happens when you add items directly from the journal or database page.

    There's many more features which you can read about starting from here:
    https://www.zotero.org/support/kb
  • Thanks so much :)
  • I'd like to add doi's to my Vancouver style bibliography. I've browsed the Style Repository for Vancouver variants - if the style doesn't add it automagically, is there a guide on adding the doi field?

    Thanks
  • Which Vancouver style are you using? Then we can give you more precise advice.
  • edited January 30, 2019
    Vancouver (superscript)
  • You could use elsevier-vancouver and change the in-text part to be superscript based on vancouver-superscript. That way is probably easier for you.
    Make sure to change the filename, self link and ID of the style. Otherwise it'll get overwritten.
  • Alright, thanks for the tip to change the other file parameters.

    I tried modifying Elsevier-Vancouver but its existing bibliography style wasn't as comprehensive as Vancouver (superscript) so I modified that instead.

    I edited in the Zotero style editor and saved the .csl file to desktop and then loaded it into Zotero – there was a warning that the file wasn't a valid csl file but it seems to be working fine.

    Will continue to test, if it's ok – should I upload to the Style Repository?
  • Validate your style here to find the errors and correct them https://validator.citationstyles.org/
  • edited January 31, 2019
    Here's the offending section. I removed the "<>" characters from each line because they caused the code to disappear on the forum post (but they remain in the .csl file). The CSL Validator gives the error at line 98 with msg: "Element “if” from namespace “http://purl.org/net/xbiblio/csl” not allowed as child of element “choose” from namespace “http://purl.org/net/xbiblio/csl” in this context. (Suppressing further errors from this subtree.)"

    I Cut and Pasted the DOI section from the Elsevier-Vancouver access macro into the same section of Vancouver (superscript).

    Any help appreciated.

    93 macro name="access"
    94 choose
    95 if variable="DOI"
    96 text variable="DOI" prefix="doi:"/
    97 /if
    98 if variable="URL"
    99 group delimiter=": "
    100 text term="available at" text-case="capitalize-first"/
    101 text variable="URL"/
    102 /group
    103 /if
    104 /choose
    105 /macro
  • You need to change the second and later “if” arguments in a “choose” argument to “else-if”
  • edited February 1, 2019
    Thanks, that fixed it on the CSL Validator site.

    I presumed that both the "else-if" and "/else-if" opening and closing arguments were required.

    However Zotero still asserts that the style is not a valid .csl file but adds it to Style Manager and appears to run it fine so far.
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