Upgrade StoragePackaged Citation Styles
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Your reaction is similar to what mine was several years ago. Upon reflection, my opinion has changed a bit. ESM is an individual who derived a substantial portion of her income from the sale of her reference style book. Along came a software package that was known for automatically generating high quality narrative from name, date, and place data that was entered into a database. Then this highly popular software added the capacity to automatically add to that narrative all of the reference marks and a well-formed reference list based upon your intellectual product. On top of that shock, the software company was advertising the the use of the style as a key benefit of the software -- essentially saying that a user no longer needed to go througn the tedious process of looking up how to properly cite a source.
That tedium is a main reason for software like Zotero, EndNote, etc. There is, I think, a difference in automating a reference style based upon what has been published in a journal's author guidelines (freely available to essentially anyone) and a proprietary style that (while required for manuscripts submitted to several journals) the details of which were never included in the author guidelines of those journals.
(I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know how to knit)
Also, her book is mostly a long-form version of Turabian/CMoS (as she herself says). Is she sharing revenues with their publishers? Because she's clearly taking advantage of their work.
More generally, I would object to the notion that there can be such a thing as a proprietary citation style. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the US civil litigation system, most people and organizations can't risk being sued even if it's almost certain they'd win - see Rintze's link above on how absurd her claims are.
As I said in the other thread, it's likely that she does have the right to ban use of her name and title of her book, which is why I suggest to give any style based on the book a generic name.
We're removing that style from existing Zotero installations with a mapping for existing documents, as we're also doing for chicago-note and aaa (which seems to have been given a different filename and URI).
@Dan - MHRA does have a short-note and an author-date version, we just don't have styles for them (yet).
I think that the different styles should not be judge by their popularity or quality. The more options the better.
This thread is about the dozen or so styles that come packaged with new installations of Zotero. That's a fraction of the >400 different styles available for Zotero.
I think the built-in styles should have as much description of the citation style as possible. For example" numeric, author-year, etc. Even showing a sample of a citation next to it.
The current window that lets you pick a citation does not display any descriptive text or sample and if you just want a generic numerical citation style it is difficult to figure out what to select to get that done without trying them all out.
>Objecting to an imperfect implementation seems reasonable; working with whoever coded the style to improve it is better. Objecting to automatic generation for fear of decreasing book sales is sheer madness.
Mark, I agree with all three of your statements here. That is why, since 1997, I have (without any compensation whatsoever) worked with most of the major developers of genealogical software when they have asked for help in improving their source-citation capability. I have not, however, worked in that capacity with the developer originally cited. Nor have I been asked to do so.
The facts of the issue raised by DWL-SDCA are these: After the 1997 publication of my first small guide to genealogical citation and analysis, a software company developed its own templates — templates that seriously misconstrued basic citation principles — then explicitly put my name on each and every template. When the product was released, I was inundated with confused and irate users of the software, who logically assumed I created the templates and reasonably asked why my manual said one thing and "my" templates did another. After some discussion of the issue with the developer, he understood the problem and issued a revised version of the software stating that the templates represented his company's interpretation of Evidence-style templates. That was a reasonable solution.
Also for the record: if profit were a motive, then my two volumes on the citation and analysis of historical records are an utter failure. Time wise, I have yet to break even on the investment — a situation well known to authors of any and all manuals used in genealogy, as well as most books by history scholars.
I do, however, take satisfaction from seeing the tremendous progress genealogical scholarship has made since my first interaction with genealogical software developers in 1984. At that year’s national conference, when I asked whether they would please, pretty please, give us the ability to cite our sources on family group sheets, the response was: “Now, Elizabeth. Nobody’s interested in source citation but a few egghead professionals like you.”
Now, source citation is standard in almost every genealogical software program. Now, most family historians share the belief that accuracy and the avoidance of brick walls in our research both require careful documentation. We have made progress.
Thank you for correcting my error. I also thank you for participating in this forum.
It's often called "Chicago-Turabian."
It differs from Chicago is a few significant ways. As it it based on Chicago, when I saw Chicago on the list of packaged citation styles, I made an assumption that it was my only option. I spent a good 18 months manually editing the citations Zotero entered for me to make my papers Turabian compliant. Many hours of extra work resulted!
As Turabian is THE standard for high schools, many basic university papers, and for the entire academic history community--a pretty wide swath of potential users, I would urge adding it to the standard installation OR making it clearer to the new user that they might want to look at the additional style sets as a part of getting oriented to Zotero.
Not sure exactly what to do about that, though. It's linked to (with "Get Additional Styles") from the Style tab in the preferences and from the Document Settings in the word processor add-on (where you'd select the style you use), and from the quick start guide (https://www.zotero.org/support/quick_start_guide ). I suppose we could also add a link from "Create Bibliography from Selected Items," but beyond that I'm really not sure.
Similarly, I find that setting the default style for Quick Copy and the general style list on tabs rather confusing. I usually click on the style list a few times when trying to change the default before I remember.