Adding the ISBN to Bibliographic Selection?

jmodica · April 17, 2011

Is there an easy way to export a bibliographic selection with the ISBN? I tried the various options by "right-clicking" but to no avail. I usually need to give this information to our bookstore for adoptions. Many thanks.

adamsmith · April 17, 2011

See here for general, very simple instructions for modifying styles:
http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/style_editing_step-by-step
getting ISBN is possible using
<text variable="ISBN"/>
you can use prefix to style this - as in:
<text variable="ISBN prefix=". "/>
(that will put a period and a space before the ISBN - you get the idea.
There are a couple of existing styles with ISBN in the repository - mostly non-US styles.

jmodica · February 26, 2018

Many thanks Adam. I found these instructions initially difficult to follow. I tried but was unsuccessful. I thought that perhaps a bibliographic style had now been created that would easily include ISBN numbers.
But I'll give it a try again.
Much appreciate your help.
Best,
--Joe

jmodica · March 6, 2018

Thanks again Adam. Where would the text variable (above) be inserted? At the very end, but before the -style-? It seems a bit complicated to me. Thanks again. --Joe

iankh256 · June 26, 2018

[Revised to show code]

I think you only need to make 3 changes to the style to make this work (in Styles that don't already have ISBNs in them). At least, I was eventually able to create a new APA 6 style with ISBNs as follows:

1) changing the ID on line 6 (so that it won't get overwritten when Zotero updates):
<id>apa_with_isbn</id>

2) Inserting the following lines as the very first macro (after the locale tags):

  <macro name="isbn">
    <text variable="ISBN" prefix=" (ISBN&#160;" suffix=")"/>
  </macro>

3) Inserting the following line where I wanted the ISBN to appear (in APA format, this was just before the period that's automatically inserted after the publisher info):
<text macro="isbn"/>
In other words, the modified bibliography layout section would read as follows (the added line is separated by whitespace):

    <layout>
      <group suffix=".">
        <group delimiter=". ">
          <text macro="author"/>
          <text macro="issued"/>
          <text macro="title-plus-extra"/>
          <text macro="container"/>
        </group>
        <text macro="legal-cites"/>
        <text macro="locators"/>
        <group delimiter=", " prefix=". ">
          <text macro="event"/>
          <text macro="publisher"/>
        </group>

        <text macro="isbn"/>

      </group>
      <text macro="access" prefix=" "/>
      <text macro="original-date" prefix=" "/>
    </layout>

4) Saving the new .csl file and adding it to Zotero.

I'd post the file here, but it's really too long. I'd have tried to add it to the Zotero repository, but the instructions on how to do so at https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/wiki/Style-Requirements indicate that they (understandably) only want to post styles that will be used by many people. If your Department (or ideally your University) were to clarify *all* of their requirements that deviate from APA format, I imagine that they would happily post a style for you all.

PLEASE NOTE: This will NOT prevent ISBNs from being broken up onto different lines. I tried to find a way to do character substitution in Zotero, but CSL doesn't appear to have any structures to allow that.

Good luck!

Ian K. Hagemann
Computer Consultant
Master's in Social Work (candidate)
University of Washington