Changing in-text citation formatting?

I have my style set to Chicago Manual of Style (author-date) and am happy with it for the full references. However, I would like to modify the formatting of my in-text citations from (author, year, p.#) to (author year: #). That is, I want to remove the commas and the 'p.' before the page number, and replace the second comma with a colon.

So far, my attempts to figure this out have led me to this page on manually changing the style in a csl editor: http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/style_editing_step-by-step.

I am wondering if there is a less involved way to make this simple change. If not, where would I find the part of a CSL Style code that relates to how in-text citations appear?

Thank you!
  • I don't think it can be done properly, since the locater label (p.) is not editable/removable. But here's a way around it:

    In the visual editor go to:

    In-line citations -> Layout -> Group: then delete the comma in the field 'Delimiter' and remember to insert an empty space instead.

    Now you have the (author year). Save the style to your computer.

    And then when you write and cite simply don't use the 'Page' box for page citations, but instead use the 'Suffix' box and write : #

    Now you have the (author year: #)

    I anyone knows a more 'proper' way of doing it, that would of course be great! But it works...
  • don't think it can be done properly, since the locater label (p.) is not editable/removable. But here's a way around it:
    That's incorrect. This is, of course, possible and I recommend against using "suffix" for page numbers (among other things because you may want to switch to a style that does require p/pp later on).

    You could try the "American Sociological Association" style from zotero.org/styles, which already does this exatly the way you want - if you're not attached to Chicago Manual specifics, that might just do it for you.
    If that's not it, it's pretty easy to change that for Chicago author-date.
  • Thank you both for your useful comments! I will try the ASA style and if that turns out not to be ideal, I'll go into the visual editor. Thank you again.
  • I definately see your point, Adam. Could you give a short version of how it's done properly? Thx a bunch.
  • edited November 10, 2013
    There shouldn't be a "p." (or "pp.") in Chicago (author-date) and it really shouldn't be there. What are you doing to get the "p. " in a citation?

    For the "p" to appear, it does need to be explicitly set as <label variable="locator"/> - which is done for every locator _except_ page number in Chicago (author-date) in the macro point-locators. If you're seeing "p." in a Chicago author-date in-text citation, something isn't working.

    For a very simple implementation without p, just look at the ASA style.
  • Sorry about being imprecise; I was actually using APA and was just curious about how to do it. But anyways, ASA also works fine for me! :-)
  • see my post above - I had hidden a key part by accident, should make more sense now. For APA you can just find that line and remove it.
  • Sorry to open this issue again, but what is the solution now for changing from (author date, #) to (author date: #) - if I indeed want to keep "Chicago Manual of Style (author-date)"?
    As has been pointed out, there is no "p." in the "Chicago Manual of Style (author-date)", but I still would like to replace the comma with a colon. How do I find what needs to be changed?
  • may I ask why? If you don't actually want to follow the Chicago Manual (which prescribes a comma), why not use a different author-date style entirely, such as American Sociological Association.

    But the short version is to change
    <layout prefix="(" suffix=")" delimiter="; ">
    <group delimiter=", ">
    to
    <layout prefix="(" suffix=")" delimiter="; ">
    <group delimiter=": ">

    https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/style_editing_step-by-step has general instructions.
  • edited March 23, 2016
    Thank you very much.

    Basically I am trying to replicate a German version of a Harvard Style. Not sure how much work that will be, just started to use Zotero today and setting it up.
    Important is the colon for in-text citations after the date and the order of last name and first name for all authors, as well as the date in parentheses followed by a colon before the title in the bibliography. Additionally, the title of the main/parent publication should be in italics (in the second example that would be "Bioinformatics" and so on...).
    Eventually I want to end up with these results (example from the Zotero Style Repository):

    (Hartman et al. 1999: #)

    Hartman, Peri; Bezos, Jeffrey P.; Kaphan, Shel; Spiegel, John (1999): „Method and system for placing a purchase order via a communications network.“ [Online].
    <https://www.google.com/patents/US5960411>;


    (Hogue 2001: #)

    Hogue, Christopher W. V. (2001): „Structure databases.“ In: Baxevanis, Andreas D.; Ouellette, B. F. Francis (eds.) Bioinformatics. 2nd edn. New York, NY: Wiley-Interscience (Life Sciences Series), 83–109.


    (Kötter/Ciriacy 1993: #)

    Kötter, Peter; Ciriacy, Michael (1993): „Xylose fermentation by Saccharomyces cerevisiae.“ In: Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology. 38(6), 776–83.


    (Pear 2008)

    Pear, Robert (2008): „Crisis puts tax moves into play.“ The New York Times. 2.10.2008.


    (Sambrock/Russell 2001: #)

    Sambrook, Joe; Russell, David William (2001): Molecular cloning: a laboratory manual. 3rd edn. Cold Spring Harbor, NY: CSHL Press.

    I thought chicago is a good style to start with. Maybe ASA is better.
    Any other suggestion?
  • I'd look at some of the existing German styles, e.g. the Samac autor-date style or the style we refer to as Harvard7 (for odd reasons).
    See https://www.zotero.org/styles?q=German%29 and restrict to author-date and unique styles.
  • yeah, I found those, they are exactly what I was looking for - only in English...
  • For the most part, you can just fix them changing default-locale="de-DE" (or "de-AT") in the first row to default-locale="en-US". There might be a couple remaining hardcoded German terms in some of them, but those are easy to find and replace (I wrote the Samac one and I try to avoid hardcoding, so if that works otherwise that might be a good choice).
  • edited January 31, 2017
    Hello, my apologies for starting this topic once again.

    My discipline (linguistics) uses APA for the bibliography, but with the colon as the delimiter. If the bibliography from the ASA style was the same I wouldn't mind using it, but it seems to differ (in details, as always with these styles).

    I have followed your advice to change the style to

    < layout prefix="(" suffix=")" delimiter="; " >
    < group delimiter=": " >

    However, I can't really follow which citation locator line I should delete from the APA file to get rid of the p., would you mind telling me that, please?

    Many thanks!
  • Before you waste any time customizing the style -- are you aware of the Unified Stylesheet for Lingusitics style that we have avaliable?
    https://www.zotero.org/styles?q=id:unified-style-linguistics
    That might just give you what you want. If not, come back and I'll walk you through the remaining edits to APA you'd need.
  • Hi @adamsmith I'm sorry I only get back to this now. The discrepancy of linguistic reference systems (across journals and books) is a major headache.

    Many thanks for showing me that stylesheet. I just checked the referencing for the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics and they do follow APA but use a colon instead of the "p.". The unified stylesheet comes close but differs in the spacing of the in-text references (they do have a space behind the colon) and it differs in the reference as it only uses initials for first names and uses (pp. ...) for individual chapters, like APA.
    Could you thus still walk me through the steps, please?
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