I don't know if this is possible, but this is one of several issues for which I would be happy simply to have some sort of a manual override of the default feature. In other words, I have to go through the document by hand to find confusing cites and then somehow indicate that I want a short title. That may be what Frank was getting at. FIlling in the short title by hand is an inelegant way of manually overriding. It's inelegant because it has to be redone for each article, but at least we have the option.
Personally I would rather violate the citation guideline and have the short title as the default since that is never confusing, and I choose clarity over rigid adherence to rules every time (but that's just me!)
I just updated to the most recent BB, and I seem to be having a related problem that an earlier user had with periods at the end of cites. When I refresh, I keep getting periods in string cites that don't belong, right before the semi colon.
cite1.; cite2.; cite3.
I take the periods out by hand and they pop up when I refresh. I'm not sure I quite understood the earlier discussion on this, but it seemed to concern inconsistency. I would far rather have resolved this by no punctuation at the end of a cite, and put punctuation in myself at the end of or in between two citations, which isn't affected by refreshing. This worked fine for me in the earlier BB version.
This is my guess as to what is happening. Zotero now gets the punctuation right the first time: For a string cite, then Zotero puts semis, for a single cite then a period. But if you later drag and drop a solo cite into a string cite, the period does not go away, ever, and you have to reinsert the cite instead of dragging and dropping.
drag and drop? you're never supposed to drag and drop when you work with the word plugin. Or i"m completely misunderstanding something here. But the way to add a citation to a multiple citation is to use "Edit citation".
I did not realise that you weren't supposed to drag and drop, since you could in the earlier version of BB, which did not put in the punctuation for you. I personally find it MUCH quicker to drag and drop than having to edit the whole citation.
Also, if I edit the whole citation it appears that I have to put the new citation at the end, which violates BB, unless I start from scratch, which can be a major problem for long string cites.
And forced multiple citation has a really serious problem: I can't put in explanatory parentheticals, which are a major requirement of a lot of BB cites (Cf. in particular) and strongly encouraged elsewhere.(see also cites) Any refreshing will destroy the parenthetical!
well, it's relatively easy to adjust the style to take out the punctuation - just find <layout suffix="." delimiter="; "> and take out suffix="." http://www.zotero.org/support/csl_simple_edits you can do this for your personal style, it's not going to be changed in the repository.
the fact that re-ordering of citations isn't possible is indeed a problem and I believe there's a ticket for that.
Parentheticals can be added in multiple citations using prefix-suffix which can be applied to every individual item in a multiple citation - so that's actually not an issue.
Wow, thanks -that editor is amazing. Is it new or did I just miss it? In any case, it also allows me to do my drag and drop, replace the period with a semi within the editor, and the period doesn't come back when I refresh. Thanks!!
I used the amazing new do-itself-yourself features to solve the last two issues I raised. It works just as I want in new documents. The only problem is that it won't update old documents. I modified the citation rules to insert short titles instead of short author names for subsequent cites:
no way of tellling without seeing your custom style -
if you go to
gist.github.com
just paste the style in the window and create public gist and post the URL here I can take a look
edit. btw - not a new feature - this has been around since the early 1.0 days at least.
ok the style looks fine as far as I can tell and this seems like a recurring error message in word - could you try what happens if you copy&paste the entire content of your word document into a new one?
More generally, try following the steps here:
http://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_troubleshooting#debugging_broken_documents
That's right. As I recall, the BB only requires a short title in supras when there are 2 by the same author in the same footnote, thus guaranteeing confusion. However, it always allows a short title, so my approach isn't a huge deviation. From a strict point of view, the biggest missing component is that I don't have a "hereinafter", but that personally doesn't seem so awful to me in comparison to the improvement in clarity.
I'm not sure that there is a good reason, but it's clear that for short subsequent references it's always either short names or short titles. Personally I would never come up with BB style if asked to design from scratch
I would speculate that the difference between BB and other styles is because a text or fn reference in the typical style is referring you to a bibliography at the end of the article with every citation. In contrast, the BB subsequent reference is also telling you to look in a particular fn, which has fewer cites than a whole bibliography, so less info is needed to clarify the intended reference
When I cite a statute, I can see only the title and the date, without the Code or Code Number fields. I notice an earlier discussion on this. Is this under construction or am I using the feature wrong?
Re short-title backreferences using "hereinafter", to do this well would require that the "hereinafter" or "short" title be assigned on a per-document basis, since the choice to use "hereinafter" turns on context and taste.
I've suggested a mechanism for managing journal abbreviations that could also be turned to this purpose. The idea is to compose a list of variable values in their long form, and permit the user to insert short-form values for use in processing the current document. (For journal abbreviations, the values can be saved to a named list of abbreviations, for future use.) There is some code in the new CSL processor to support such a thing, but it would require a significant extension to the Zotero UI to get it working.
Now that I have looked at the BB code, I have some general comments.(I am a very amateur coder, know only what I need for statistical progamming, no csl). I will try to brief but will be happy to expand if helpful.
I think that the author-source structure is probably great for non BB scholarly styles. The problem is, BB was not developed as a scholarly style, and authorship is often totally unimportant. So BB style now works well for scholarly works but not for legal documents.
I also think it is probably a mistake to try to develop BB too elegantly. It is a very ad hoc (or messy) set of rules. I also agree with the comments to the source macro that most of what is there would be better handled in more specific macros. My best guess is that the citation code should be something like ( I am skipping over the the details of the ibid and subsequent positions):
I'm sure that the details of this are wrong but I hope it conveys the basic idea. Perhaps all the scholarly stuff can be treated in one macro(articles, books, etc) that would have the author-source structure, but I believe that the legal materials should be separated out.
If I followed the earlier discussion correctly, there was a decision made not to include court names in case cites , though BB usually requires this, because there is an exception for the Supreme Court that would be hard to implement. Personallly I would prefer to have the inclusion of the4 court name as the default - by leaving the Court field blank in S Ct cases you could get the correct result.
If there is some reason not to do this in the general version, could someone please suggest code so I can put it in my personal version?
Including the court in all cases sounds right. On a quick trawl, I wasn't able to find the earlier discussion in the thread that you mention, but IIRC cites to the US Supreme Court don't need the court name because it's implied by the name of the reporter. No data loss from leaving it out of the database, should be okay there.
The CSL variable that should catch the court name is "authority", so you can insert it with something like:<choose> <if type="legal_case"> <text variable="authority"/> </if> <choose>It looks like the insertion belongs somewhere around line 162 of the current repository version of the BB style.
I tried to kluge the omission of the court name by adding them to the date, since they belong in the same parenthetical. For example, in stead of 2009 as a date I say "CA9 2009"
Zotero somehow seems to be extracting the date only?!?! Any and all suggestions on a permanent or temporary fix gratefully accepted
Yep, Zotero parses the date and discards the rest. That's needed in order do things like printing only the year when a complete date is entered into the field.
Hi guys, I was wondering if you could make a minor fix. Bluebook says that when you are citing a book after its initial citation, the author's name should be in small caps, i.e.:
Levinson, supra note ___ at 34.
Zotero uses small caps for the author for the initial citation of a book author but not for subsequent citations.
I've fixed a minor issue where book citations were displaying an extra space before the year in the 'issuance' macro. Tested and looks ok for simple books and for chapters in edited books. I've pushed to the repository.
Hello there. I was very happy to find this thread, but disappointed to discover that the Bluebook Law-Review citation style isn't currently available--at any rate, I can't find it. A search of the styles repository doesn't find it, and fbennett's link above, from June of last year, returns "Style not found."
Am I looking in the wrong places? Or has the style been withdrawn? If the latter, will it be republished? You all seem to have put a great deal of thought and work into it, which I really appreciate, and there is definitely a need for it; so I hope it'll be available soon. Thanks for any information anybody can offer on the status of this style.
Thanks! These styles don't seem to be tagged as relating to the "Law" field, and the examples that pop up don't include citations to statutes or judicial opinions, so I wasn't sure they were what I was looking for--though I guess if I'd been paying more attention, the name "Bluebook Law-Review" ought to have clued me in.
I am curious about differences among the various styles. Do the different styles supplement one another, or are they alternatives? Should I pick one, or install them all?
The Bluebook situation does need some housecleaning. Among the available options, as far as I know the only version being actively maintained is bluebook-19th.csl. It's still in draft, but worth giving a try; if you notice things that aren't right with it, post a note here and I'll try to turn around a fix quickly.
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Personally I would rather violate the citation guideline and have the short title as the default since that is never confusing, and I choose clarity over rigid adherence to rules every time (but that's just me!)
I just updated to the most recent BB, and I seem to be having a related problem that an earlier user had with periods at the end of cites. When I refresh, I keep getting periods in string cites that don't belong, right before the semi colon.
cite1.; cite2.; cite3.
I take the periods out by hand and they pop up when I refresh. I'm not sure I quite understood the earlier discussion on this, but it seemed to concern inconsistency. I would far rather have resolved this by no punctuation at the end of a cite, and put punctuation in myself at the end of or in between two citations, which isn't affected by refreshing. This worked fine for me in the earlier BB version.
This is my guess as to what is happening. Zotero now gets the punctuation right the first time: For a string cite, then Zotero puts semis, for a single cite then a period. But if you later drag and drop a solo cite into a string cite, the period does not go away, ever, and you have to reinsert the cite instead of dragging and dropping.
Many thanks
Isis
Also, if I edit the whole citation it appears that I have to put the new citation at the end, which violates BB, unless I start from scratch, which can be a major problem for long string cites.
And forced multiple citation has a really serious problem: I can't put in explanatory parentheticals, which are a major requirement of a lot of BB cites (Cf. in particular) and strongly encouraged elsewhere.(see also cites) Any refreshing will destroy the parenthetical!
thanks for all your help
Isis
just find
<layout suffix="." delimiter="; ">
and take out suffix="."
http://www.zotero.org/support/csl_simple_edits
you can do this for your personal style, it's not going to be changed in the repository.
the fact that re-ordering of citations isn't possible is indeed a problem and I believe there's a ticket for that.
Parentheticals can be added in multiple citations using prefix-suffix which can be applied to every individual item in a multiple citation - so that's actually not an issue.
I modified the citation rules to insert short titles instead of short author names for subsequent cites:
<citation>
........
<choose>
. . . .
<else-if position="subsequent">
<text variable="title" form="short" />
When I update, the author names remain, and I get the error message
"The range cannot be deleted"
Any way around this?
Many thanks for a fabulous and amazingly user friendly new feature
if you go to
gist.github.com
just paste the style in the window and create public gist and post the URL here I can take a look
edit. btw - not a new feature - this has been around since the early 1.0 days at least.
http://gist.github.com/296971
Hope this works!
The only thing I (intentionally)changed was the line of code described in my last post plus your suggestion about dropping periods.
More generally, try following the steps here:
http://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_troubleshooting#debugging_broken_documents
I would speculate that the difference between BB and other styles is because a text or fn reference in the typical style is referring you to a bibliography at the end of the article with every citation. In contrast, the BB subsequent reference is also telling you to look in a particular fn, which has fewer cites than a whole bibliography, so less info is needed to clarify the intended reference
When I cite a statute, I can see only the title and the date, without the Code or Code Number fields. I notice an earlier discussion on this. Is this under construction or am I using the feature wrong?
Thanks!
Isis
I've suggested a mechanism for managing journal abbreviations that could also be turned to this purpose. The idea is to compose a list of variable values in their long form, and permit the user to insert short-form values for use in processing the current document. (For journal abbreviations, the values can be saved to a named list of abbreviations, for future use.) There is some code in the new CSL processor to support such a thing, but it would require a significant extension to the Zotero UI to get it working.
As I understand it, the core of the style is
<citation>
. . .
<choose>
<if position="ibid">
......
<else-if position="subsequent">
. . . . .
</else-if>
<else>
<text macro="author" suffix=", "/>
<text macro="source" />
<text macro="access" prefix=", "/>
. . . . .
</citation>
I think that the author-source structure is probably great for non BB scholarly styles. The problem is, BB was not developed as a scholarly style, and authorship is often totally unimportant. So BB style now works well for scholarly works but not for legal documents.
I also think it is probably a mistake to try to develop BB too elegantly. It is a very ad hoc (or messy) set of rules. I also agree with the comments to the source macro that most of what is there would be better handled in more specific macros. My best guess
is that the citation code should be something like ( I am skipping over the the details of the ibid and subsequent positions):
<citation>
. . .
<choose>
<if position="ibid">
......
<else-if position="subsequent">
. . . . .
</else-if>
<else>
<if type="article" text macro ="article">
<if type="statute" text macro ="statute">
<if type="case" text macro ="case">
. . . .
</citation>
I'm sure that the details of this are wrong but I hope it conveys the basic idea. Perhaps all the scholarly stuff can be treated in one macro(articles, books, etc) that would have the author-source structure, but I believe that the legal materials should be separated out.
Thanks you
If I followed the earlier discussion correctly, there was a decision made not to include court names in case cites , though BB usually requires this, because there is an exception for the Supreme Court that would be hard to implement. Personallly I would prefer to have the inclusion of the4 court name as the default - by leaving the Court field blank in S Ct cases you could get the correct result.
If there is some reason not to do this in the general version, could someone please suggest code so I can put it in my personal version?
TIA
Isis
Including the court in all cases sounds right. On a quick trawl, I wasn't able to find the earlier discussion in the thread that you mention, but IIRC cites to the US Supreme Court don't need the court name because it's implied by the name of the reporter. No data loss from leaving it out of the database, should be okay there.
The CSL variable that should catch the court name is "authority", so you can insert it with something like:
<choose>It looks like the insertion belongs somewhere around line 162 of the current repository version of the BB style.<if type="legal_case">
<text variable="authority"/>
</if>
<choose>
Isis
I tried to kluge the omission of the court name by adding them to the date, since they belong in the same parenthetical. For example, in stead of 2009 as a date I say "CA9 2009"
Zotero somehow seems to be extracting the date only?!?! Any and all suggestions on a permanent or temporary fix gratefully accepted
Isis
Levinson, supra note ___ at 34.
Zotero uses small caps for the author for the initial citation of a book author but not for subsequent citations.
Am I looking in the wrong places? Or has the style been withdrawn? If the latter, will it be republished? You all seem to have put a great deal of thought and work into it, which I really appreciate, and there is definitely a need for it; so I hope it'll be available soon. Thanks for any information anybody can offer on the status of this style.
Regards,
Jim Crutchfield
Long Island City, NY
I'm not sure why there are multiple Bluebook styles in the style repository (fbennett might know more about the differences between them).
I am curious about differences among the various styles. Do the different styles supplement one another, or are they alternatives? Should I pick one, or install them all?