style previewing discrepancies

phyto
Dear all,

I am in the (painful) process of looking for styles that are similar enough to a style that I would like to request in Zotero.

I am following the guidelines on http://www.zotero.org/support/requesting_styles.

The "Amino Acids" style seems quite close to the one I am looking for, at least when I hover over its style name in the style repository. I installed the Amino Acids style on my computer. I can select it in Zotero preferences > Export. However, when I perform a quick-copy of some selected references in my Zotero library, book sections (chapters) do not appear like what is shown when hovering, i.e. it appears like :

Authors (year) title of the chapter. Title of the book, editors, pages

Whereas on hovering it is displayed like :

Author (2001) Title of the chapter. In: Editors (eds) Title of the book, ed, publisher, city, pages.

When I paste chrome://zotero/content/tools/cslpreview.xul into firefox, I get a comparison of all the installed styles but "Amino Acids" does not appear in the list! (whereas I can see Chicago, IEEE, etc.)

I had similar troubles with other styles, for instance with the MEPS style : I had the same formatting by quick-copying and using the preview.xul stuff (at least MEPS appeared in the list), but it was different from what was displayed by hovering!!

Did anybody observe the same problem ?

Firefox 7.0.1, Zotero 2.1.10
  • adamsmith
    Two things:
    The reason you're not seeing the Amino Acids style in cslpreview.xul is that it's not an independent style - it's just a link to the style "Springer Author Date" - work with that style.
    (the instructions in the documentation still refer to the old repository: Where it says: "uncheck the “Show dependent styles” check box" it should read "check the 'Show only unique styles" check box".)

    The Amino Acids (=Springer Author Date) style is most definitely:
    Author (2001) Title of the chapter. In: Editors (eds) Title of the book, ed, publisher, city, pages.

    my suspicion would be that you're doing something wrong with quick copy, but there is a small chance that quick copy just isn't working correctly for dependent styles, I'll have a look. Have you tried using the word plugin or using "Create Bibliography"?

    Can't tell you what's going on with MEPS, except that it might not have shown you the preview - the style was added just a 3 days ago and it takes a while for the preview to appear.
  • adamsmith
    Also, for the instructions, as long as the style is decently similar that's fine.
    I'd much rather you spend your time making sure that the list of differences is accurate and complete
  • phyto
    Thanks for your reply!

    "my suspicion would be that you're doing something wrong with quick copy, (...) Have you tried using the word plugin or using "Create Bibliography"?"

    When I use the word plugin , the bibliography is formatted identically to the formatting of the quick-copy (I tried the Amino Acids style and Springer Author date style),i.e. I obtained :

    Seemüller E, Harries H (2009) Plant resistance. Phytoplasmas: genomes, plant hosts and vectors, P.G. Weintraub and P. Jones. CABI, pp 147-169

    Whereas I would expect:

    Seemüller E, Harries H (2009) Plant resistance. In: P.G. Weintraub and P. Jones (eds) Phytoplasmas: genomes, plant hosts and vectors, CABI, pp 147-169

    I do not know which version of the word plugin I am using (I could not figure out how to read its version number), so I downloaded the most recent version but I still get the same (wrong) formatting of my bibliography. Could it come from my zotero database? I double-checked my test references and for the one above it is of the "Book section" item type.

    "Also, for the instructions, as long as the style is decently similar that's fine.
    I'd much rather you spend your time making sure that the list of differences is accurate and complete"

    I am glad to read this, as I found it desperately boring to go through all the styles and look for the most similar ones, then compare them again to choose the best one... I suggest that the Zotero webmaster include your advice on the web page describing guidelines for requesting styles.

    Many thanks anyway, I will start a new thread for requesting my style using Springer author date as a starting point, hoping that I will find a workaround for the weird formatting problem in the meantime.
  • adamsmith
    are you sure you have entered the information the right way? Does it say "Editor" in front of Weintraub and Jones in your Zotero database? Is this marked as a book section?
    I can just not see how Springer Author Date would give you this output with correctly input data, regardless of any Zotero or Word plugin versions.
    If you want me to take a look, you could make a screenshot of how the data (right hand panel in Zotero) looks, post it on imageshack and put a link here, or you could export the item as Zotero RDF, open the file with a text editor and paste the output as a public gist to gist.github.com
  • phyto
    Many thanks for your suggestions Adamsmith!

    To my great confusion, I realized that my test reference for book section contained a mistake : its item type really was "book section", but, like you envisioned it, it was not written "Editor" in front of "Weintraub and Jones" but "Edition"! So I corrected the entry and formatting works as expected now for the Springer Author Date style.

    Surely I was not paying enough attention when manually filling the entry for this reference and since no "Editor" field was apparent at once, I used the "Edition" one.

    I apologize for this and thank you for your help.
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