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 and a great example of the debilitating effects that copyright-centered for-profit thinking can have on development.
@mark 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.
nah - the woman calls herself a scholar. A scholar should be interested in facilitating scholarship and spreading the use of her or his work, not obstructing it because it interferes with her income (which, I'm pretty sure, is doing rather well with speaking engagements etc. in the first place).
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.
@DWL-SDCA, I can't bring up much respect for someone who apparently says to people in her field of study, "I want you to waste your time checking out al the crazy little style details in my book and then hand-crafting your references, because I'm making money out of that". If someone expects to be making money out of that in the age of CSL they have chosen the wrong business model and it is time to innovate or move on to another area.
Would it also be possible to rename "mhra_note_without_bibliography.csl" to use hyphens?
Looks like this was done, but presumably it should just be removed or made a dependent style based on the main MHRA, as was done for chicago-note.
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).
Yes, I've recently renamed a bunch of styles, replacing many acronyms by the full name (aaa.csl has become american-anthropological-association.csl). @adamsmith, Dan's suggestion for MHRA w/o bib (now mhra-note-without-bibliography.csl) is fine with you?
I am very sad that Zotero decided to drop ASA. I understand that their guidelines are not clear but as a sociology graduate student I am required to use that format. I really enjoyed using Zotero but this is forcing me to find another similar software.
I think that the different styles should not be judge by their popularity or quality. The more options the better.
No, we're not dropping ASA (or any other style). ASA is still available for everyone on the Zotero style repository: http://www.zotero.org/styles
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.
Mark wrote (with regard to me): >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.
@ElizabethShownMills Please accept my apology for misstating the primary reason for your taking exception to the attempt to incorporate your style guide into the genealogy software TMG. I certainly intended no disrespect. Indeed, I have nothing but respect for your philosophy to accuracy, precision, and reproducibility. Your efforts, if not instrumental, were at least important in motivating family researchers to focus upon facts over fables.
Thank you for correcting my error. I also thank you for participating in this forum.
DWL-SDCA: No apology is needed. As genealogists we all recognize that every happening can be interpreted in multiple ways and that the details of any situation, as they are told and retold, can stray off course in wondrous directions.
@ElizabethShownMills, thanks for this. From your latest responses, it seems I misconstrued the case as being about copyright and profit concerns. My apologies for that, and thank you for coming back here in good spirits and setting the record straight.
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 going to package Turabian (Chicago Manual is the better style, both in terms of our implementation and in terms of how well thought-out the actual style guidelines are; I also think you overestimate its usage quite a bit. At the HS level I've mostly seen APA and MLA, and most of academic history, including most journals and major book series, use Chicago 15th or 16th edition) but you're not the first person who is unaware of the style repository, so making that more visible is certainly worthwhile.
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.
I find the + button to install a local style file and the Get Addtional Styles link rather confusing. I think the + button should instead load the repository, with an Install from Local File button therein. I think that might be clearer to users.
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.
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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.