Another bug: after clicking the "Remove Field Codes" button in Zotero, italic styling of e.g. book titles is removed.

1) Here is one example of a book that has a page range of 1-393 in the # Pages field in Zotero, but nevertheless there is still an URL added tot he citation (using square brackets instead of "<" due to Zotero forum stripping the latter as if it is HTML code):

1. August Reinisch, International Organizations before National Courts (Cambridge University Press 2000) [http://ebooks.cambridge.org/ebook.jsf?bid=CBO9780511494437] accessed 18 March 2013.


2) Wow, I was not aware of this. Just looked through my Master's thesis handed in last year and realized that all my book citations were non-italic due to this bug...

Yes, this is what I was referring to. I though it might be possible to drop the URL if the # Pages field in Zotero for a book was populated in order to tackle this problem.

Anyway, as a workaround I'll just move the URL to the "extras" field for those books where the URL field is populated. Thanks for the quick response and the good work on the OSCOLA style!

thanks - IIRC this is something Zotero does that I may not be able to control in the citation style, but I'll double-check and let you know for sure.

Should the OSCOLA Zotero CSL work with other applications? I have tried it with Pandoc and its use of Citeproc and the results are generally correct but there are a few issues. (For example, journal names don't appear and back-references don't seem to work properly.) However, I may be doing something else wrong as I am new to Pandoc and CSL generally.

From my (very limited) testing, it seems that there are problems with secondary sources also---they are all listed as 'Interview with', no matter what they really are.

Debugging these issues is probably off-topic for the Zotero forums---are there any good places to turn to for help with this? There doesn't seem to be a general forum for citeproc.js.

@adamsmith - I have posted some sample data at https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/34324/using-oscola-csl-with-other-software/

Adamsmith: I have two suggested enhancements for OSCOLA when it comes to citation of secondary sources. Hope you have time to take a look at them - would love to help out myself, but the style has become so complex that I can't understand most of the code anymore... :-S

Please also see my endnote at the bottom - maybe I can contribute after all, by documenting workarounds as suggested there :-)


1) Random secondary sources (item type=document)
At present, when I cite secondary sources that do not really fit into any category, stored simply with the item type "document" in Zotero, the citation output does not conform to the OSCOLA specification.

OSCOLA mandates that secondary sources should be cited like this, unless it falls in a specified category: "author, | ‘title’ | (additional information, | publisher | year)".
PS: Although it says "year", it should be interpreted as "date". This is illustrated by the examples in OSCOLA 4th edn at p 39, which include month and date where appropriate.

Example of a correct citation:
John Doe, ‘Factsheet: EULEX Kosovo’ (European External Action Service, February 2014) <http://eeas.europa.eu/csdp/missions-and-operations/eulex-kosovo/pdf/factsheet_eulex_kosovo_en.pdf>; accessed 2 July 2014

Currently, Zotero does not add the information in parantheses. E.g.:
John Doe, ‘Factsheet: EULEX Kosovo’ <http://eeas.europa.eu/csdp/missions-and-operations/eulex-kosovo/pdf/factsheet_eulex_kosovo_en.pdf>; accessed 2 July 2014.

I would be great if the style could be updated to include this. For the "additional information" part, I guess the relevant Zotero field for pulling the data from would be the one labeled "Extra".


2) Magazine/journal articles & issue numbers (puching the limits of OSCOLA!)
(a) For articles in magazines and journals without a running page number (each issue starts at p. 1) OSCOLA specifies that one should cite the issue number in parentheses after the volume number.

Currently, the OSCOLA style does not output such articles correctly by default. Here is an example: Melanie Dulong de Rosnay and Melanie Dulong de Rosnay, ‘Open Content Licenses Without Representation: Can You Give Away More Rights Than You Have?’ (2013) 4 European Journal of Law and Technology.

Handling this automatically in Zotero seems to me to be impossible, since it cannot guess whether a magazine/journal has continuous pagination or not. Luckily, I can fix this particular issue by manually editing the volume number from 4 --> 4(3), which results in a correct citation: Melanie Dulong de Rosnay and Melanie Dulong de Rosnay, ‘Open Content Licenses Without Representation: Can You Give Away More Rights Than You Have?’ (2013) 4(3) European Journal of Law and Technology.

(b) More difficult is the case where no volume number is given. Here OSCOLA simply does not have a suggestion as to how it should be cited (!!). This is rather strange, since magazines typically only have a year and an issue number.

Currently, such citations come out like this using the OSCOLA style: Safet Orucevic, ‘Mostar: Europe’s Failure’ [1996] Bosnia Report 25.

As you can see, without the issue number it could be difficult to locate the source. Each year there might be many issues and there might not be easily available indexes of all the issues for a given year. For that reason an issue number should be inserted when there is no volume number.

But the question is: how? Following OSCOLA's general style guidance, I suggest the following format (example): Safet Orucevic, ‘Mostar: Europe’s Failure’ [1996] No 2 Bosnia Report 25. By adding "No", the issue number cannot be mistaken for a volume number.

Is it possible to make this work automatically in Zotero?

(As I finished writing I realized that a workaround is also possible in this instance, by putting "No 2" in the "volume" field in Zotero. Alternatively, for magazines etc without page numbers at all (think online magazines) the issue number could be defined by using "issue" as locator when citing in word/writer. For example: Safet Orucevic, ‘Mostar: Europe’s Failure’ [1996] Bosnia Report no. 2 <http://www.bosnia.org.uk/bosrep/report_format.cfm?articleid=1757&reportid=114>; accessed 2 July 2014.

I also realized that getting this to work automatically seems to be just as complex for (b) as it is for (a). I nevertheless ask the question to be sure.)


ENDNOTE
Although it may not be possible to implement the changes suggested under 2) in OSCOLA, my workarounds may be of interest to people using this tile. Maybe they should be added to some form of documentation? I would gladly assist in keeping a wiki page on OSCOLA workarounds up to date!)

You might describe the "2" as an issue number or as a volume number, but its role in the cite is the same either way. The "2" should go in the Volume field.

that'd be in MLZ. It'll break this in the vanilla-Zotero OSCOLA style because

I don't know how you can discriminate between them in CSL 1.0.1, without resorting to some sort of style-specific workaround

I don't think it's style-specific, but the workaround here is that we assume year-as-volume where we have a year but no volume number.

We should be able to just add the issue number as in Frank's example.

Luckily, I can fix this particular issue by manually editing the volume number from 4 --> 4(3)

that's actually the solution I suggest in my sample data entry: https://www.zotero.org/groups/oscola_samples/items/itemKey/ZH58QKUA
and that's indeed the only solution we have for this at the moment. It's a problem, because this requirement, dumb as it is (I think people should just add the issue number all the time) is becoming more and more common.

Random secondary sources (item type=document)

I'll take a look at this, but I won't use the extra field. I pretty much try to avoid that as much as possible. So I'll add (publisher, year). You could add the "additional information" into the publisher field as a hack if you really want to.

In other styles (and I think some version of the MLZ guide), I have seen recommendations to use Magazine to refer to journals where pagination is by issue. Will that work in this case?

In the medium to long term, is there possibility of a "continuous-pagination" variable being added to CSL and a checkbox to indicate this Zotero, so that it can be tested for?

Definitely agree this is one of the most inane conventions in citation…

The Zotero OSCOLA style has form="short" set on ordinary case titles, so if you have "Barrett" entered in the Short Title field, it will render that way.

That does not seem right. It should be checked by others, though, so I've put forward a change request. If it clears review, this will be fixed soon.

yeah, that's a function of how first-reference-note-number works, nothing I can do about this in the style.
I guess my approach would be to keep the chapters separate while writing, though there may be other reasons that keep you from doing that.

Hi. I'm using OSCOLA style. However, I'd prefer that my footnotes appear always the full reference of an article/and not a reference to a previous footnote that has used the same reference. I tried using the "Use from Library" option instead of "Previous citation" but doesn't work. Any suggestions?

Today I noticed that conference papers are not rendered correctly in OSCOLA. At present I get the following when using the word plugin or "copy to clipboard" function on a item with all necessary metadata:

Motoyo Kamiya, ‘A Study of Formal Relationships between Civil Society and Multilateral Bodies: Accreditation and Other Consultative Modalities’ (2007)

The correct mode of citation according to section 3.4.6 of the OSCOLA manual is, however, as follows:

Motoyo Kamiya, ‘A Study of Formal Relationships between Civil Society and Multilateral Bodies: Accreditation and Other Consultative Modalities’ (Building Bridges III: Engaging Civil Society from Muslim States and Communities with the Multilateral Sphere, 27-28 October 2007)

In other words, the name of the conference and full date is lacking.

(Before I begin, let me thank you adamsmith for your latest post. I did not realize that the item type was the culpit.)

I came across a peculiar form of book chapter today, namely a chapter by one author in what is (apart from that chapter) a monograph by a different author. The book in question is EU administrative law by P Craig, where the final chapter has been written by A Tsadiras. In a book by Oxford University Press, which is using an OSCOLA(-ish) style, the chapter is referenced as follows:

A Tsadiras (2012), ‘The Ombudsman’, in P Craig, EU Administrative Law (2nd edn, OUP).

(Note the lack of an (ed) following P Craig's name.)

This peculiar book chapter type is not covered by the OSCOLA manual at all, but Zotero appears to have the capacity to format this correctly, since it is possible to choose "book author" rather than "editor" for P Craig when editing the item in Zotero. This is, however, not picked up by the OSCOLA style, which produces the following citation in that case:

1. Alexandros Tsadiras, ‘The Ombudsman’, EU Administrative Law (2nd edn, OUP 2012).

As we can see, P Craig is dropped from the citation when put as "Book Author" rather than "Editor". My suggestion is therefore that the OSCOLA style is updated to pick up the "Book Author" field, as in the first quoted example.

(I fully understand if you do not wish to follow this suggestion, since it is not in the official OSCOLA manual. But I do want to emphasize that there is no rule against it either -- it was simply not thought of.)