Problems with certain citations formats - RNA and G&D

apalazzo

Hi,

I've been using Zotero to manage the citations and bibliographies in my last few manuscripts - thanks so much for developing this software. I just need a quick fix with a few citation styles:

In the "RNA" and "Genes & Development" formats, all the authors are included within a citation when only the first author should be listed.

Thanks in advance.

adamsmith

can you link to the respective style guides? and give examples of what is not right?
This is an easy fix which I'd be happy to make for you.

noksagt

The two styles are the same & should really be dependent styles. The author instructions have moved from the location specified in the CSL files:
http://rnajournal.cshlp.org/site/misc/ifora_msprep.xhtml
http://genesdev.cshlp.org/site/misc/ifora_msprep.xhtml
They don't disclose how many authors to use in a citation; only in the bibliography. I agree that, in the absence of explicit instructions, fewer names make sense for citations & seems to be how they are cited in sample issues of the journal.

adamsmith

OK - I'll take a look later. Most journals refer to recent published articles as a source for citation styles so that seems right.

apalazzo

"They don't disclose how many authors to use in a citation; only in the bibliography."

Yeah I know, and I realize that this may be the source of the problem. I just checked published manuscripts that appear in both journals and they use a maximum of two authors in their citations.

Thanks for all your help.

apalazzo

Also they append "et al." after the first author's name in the case that there are more than two authors.

adamsmith

OK - so it's max two authors and then et al. - easy enough, will get it done today I think.

adamsmith

OK - so I've changed the CHSLP style on which all of these are based.
GD already has a dependent style based on this _in addition_ to an existing independent style.

@apalazzo: Just install the Cold Harbor Spring Laboratory Press style and you'll be fine.

@noksagt: So if I see this correctly what should be done is to delete the independent G&D style and to substitute the RNA style with a dependent style linking to chslp.csl - before doing that I wanted to make sure that's right, though. Also, what happens to the people who have one of those styles installed atm?

apalazzo

Thanks. I used the CSHLP style and everything looks fine except for a few glitches.

The first, I'm guessing is easy to fix - this style is using the official journal name instead of the abbreviated name in the Bibliography. So instead of "Mol. Biol. Cell" it lists "Molecular Biology of the Cell". This is not so bad except that certain journals such as Science are now listed in the bibliography with their location (in this case "Science (New York, NY)"). I checked RNA and G&D and they use abbreviated names.

The second problem is that now a few citations are strangely formated. The weird thing is that in a manuscript with >50citations only 3 are screwy. In one citation the first and middle abbreviations of the first author are included "(S B Choi et al. 2000)". In another case the first and middle abbreviations of the second (but not the first!) author are listed "(Görlich and T A Rapoport 1993)". And finally in a third case it lists the complete first name of the first author "(Changlin Wang et al. 2008)". I definitely did not have this problem with the RNA style so I'm guessing there's something funny with the CSHLP format.

adamsmith

I'm surprised that the second one would be different for the two styles -

Short version - Zotero uses author's first names when there is another author of the same name - in many cases that happens to be the same author, which in another entry has a different first name (e.g. T. Rapoport, vs. Trevor Rapoport, vs. Trevor A. Rapoport - for Zotero those are three different authors).

Journal Abbreviations: I've just corrected CHSLP to use journal abbreviations (which they seem to do across journals). Note that Zotero uses whatever is in the Journal Abbr. field for the item in that case. So it should display the same behavior as RNA now.

Anyway - for the time being I've also changed the RNA style, so you can just use that one.

noksagt

@noksagt: So if I see this correctly what should be done is to delete the independent G&D style and to substitute the RNA style with a dependent style linking to chslp.csl

I had actually checked in dependent styles for all of the CSHLP journals back in October. I thought I would have removed the independent (and redundant) rna.csl and genesdev.csl at that time. No idea why they're still there.

Also, what happens to the people who have one of those styles installed atm?

Assuming that they're using the same id element, I'd think that it should all work as intended.

adamsmith

OK - that sounds good - but the whole thing seems to require some more work, as the CHSLP seems to be a bit of a mess - maybe not anymore after the two errors I just corrected with apalazzo's help , but I'm not holding my breath. Before we make this the main independent style I want to make sure it's pretty much OK.

apalazzo

"I'm surprised that the second one would be different for the two styles -"

I went back to check and again you are right, the old RNA style also listed a few extra abbreviations and first names sprinkled throughout the manuscript. I tried a few other formats (e.g. Cell Journal), and other don't have this weird quirk. I guess for now I'll just use the CSHLP style (or the new RNA style) and manually delete the few abreviations.

Thanks for all your help.

adamsmith

cool - as I said - you can get rid of that also by making sure that you have unified first names for those authors in your Zotero entries.