Request: Unified Style Sheet for Linguistic Journals

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  • edited July 30, 2018
    1. Great, thanks! (Tested and confirmed that this works.)

    2. I don't know that there are guidelines for unpublished works in this somewhat ad-hoc standard. But when in doubt, copying other widely used formats (e.g., "Presented at Conference Name, Location") would be fine. Better to provide more information than less, since this is something of a 'living' standard, just based on how linguists typically cite papers, not strict requirements of any organization. It hasn't been updated since 2007 according to the LSA source (linked in the first post) as far as I can tell. Also discussed here:
    https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/unified-style-sheet
    Note there that published conference proceedings papers are explicitly to be treated as journal articles (if a series with ISSN) or book chapters. Unpublished presentations are not mentioned.
  • @damnation If you want to adjust the style to treat paper-conference the same as speech in the event a presentation is inadvertently stored as the wrong type, see APA where the event macro tests for page and/or volume.
  • I've been playing with this a bit more, and regarding the "Presentation" type, it seems odd to me that it insists on inserting "Paper" before "presented at", given that there is also a "Type" field and we might want to write "Poster", or just leave it blank.

    As I wrote above, this is a 'living' style without clear standards for things like conference presentations, but generally the spirit of the style is to keep clutter to a minimum, so I would suggest removing the word "Paper" as a prefix in the part where "presented at" is added. I found where to do this myself, but I'd suggest making it part of the standard. And in that case, also capitalize "Presented".

    Even better would be to have variable behavior so that if there is a "Type" value we can specify "Poster presented at" (or "Paper presented at"), but still by default have "Presented at".

    Note that in Linguistics a poster and a paper are not considered the same thing. Specification of "poster" seems optional (formally a poster is less prestigious than a paper=talk, but often that is not distinguished, e.g., in bibliographies). However, calling a poster a "Paper [presented at]" is certainly incorrect.
  • edited July 31, 2018
    Current status, partial fix:

    I changed one line:
    text term="presented at" prefix="" suffix=" " text-case="capitalize-first"/

    Originally:
    text term="presented at" prefix="Paper " suffix=" "/

    [Code angle brackets removed to allow it to show up here.]

    Example:

    Original result:
    Bachmann, Ingo. 2010. Sit-Ving vs. sit-and-V: Determinants of variation in the verbal complement of sit. Paper presented at the ICAME 31, University of Giessen, Germany.

    Current result:
    Bachmann, Ingo. 2010. Sit-Ving vs. sit-and-V: Determinants of variation in the verbal complement of sit. Presented at the ICAME 31, University of Giessen, Germany.

    Optional "Type" example:
    Bachmann, Ingo. 2010. Sit-Ving vs. sit-and-V: Determinants of variation in the verbal complement of sit. Poster. Presented at the ICAME 31, University of Giessen, Germany.

    Not ideal for the "Poster" type, but at least the information is there and it's clear.

    I'd suggest publishing this as the style for Zotero. However, my edit may not be the best way to do this, so feel free to change that. (For example, I used "capitalize-first" in the hope of eventually integrating the Type within that same line, but I'm not sure how to do that, so obviously just writing "Presented at" would be simpler than what I wrote if this is not going to be updated.)

    ---
    By the way, manually switching over my Zotero entries (130!) from "Conference Paper" to "Presentation" is a pain when the fields "Conference Name" and "Meeting Name" are needlessly called different things so I need to copy and paste every time and ignore the warning that Conference Name will be deleted if I change the type. Can't they both just be called "Meeting Name" (which I guess is more general).
  • For the record, I think the proposed changes make sense. Given the fluidity of the style (there is no style handbook, for instance), it is not impossible that future changes would be needed but these seem sensible defaults.
  • Yes, the adding of “Paper” rather than using the “genre” variable is weird for this style and should be changed (see how this is done in APA).

    Agreed that conference name and meeting name should be mapped to each other when changing item types. @dstillman Could that change be made without messing up syncing, etc.?
  • edited July 31, 2018
    Thank you both!

    @mark, the closest we have to guidelines for this sort of thing is to use the 2007 outline "as a default, but with discretion to use common sense" (as quoted from David Denison in the style sheet). Most of the phrasing there is for minimal formatting ("superfluous... omitted", etc.). I really like the Linguistics citation trend for this reason.

    Yes, those two changes would be great. I'd still love to see "Conference Paper" to default to "Presentation" if no pages (etc.) are supplied (as in other styles), but I understand if that's not an immediate priority.

    I've been testing the style by going through my entries (I have several thousand, comparing hundreds of languages for my dissertation, including a number of non-standard reference types), and so far the style is working out very well. So I'll just say that in general Zotero is a huge help for my work-- a few years ago, back when I had accumulated about 300 references I realized I was going to lose my mind if I had to keep track of them in my head, and I switched over, and now the sort of comparative work I do simply wouldn't be possible without some good way to organize and tag everything, and this is it, so thanks to everyone working so hard on Zotero. My complaints/feedback should not suggest I'm not happy with it overall. Still some things to work out, but overall very good.
  • edited July 31, 2018
    You can look at the “event” macro in APA to see how this sort of thing could be handled. Feel free to submit a pull request to the CSL styles repository on GitHub. I’m personally swamped at the moment and won’t have time to do this until September at the earliest.

    Edit: Fixed reference to event macro
  • My ability to correctly edit a .cls file is limited at best. I can guess a bit, but it should be proofread before my changes are accepted anyway, so it would just be easier for someone who really knows what they're doing to make these changes.
    For the moment I'm happy with my slightly customized version (just removing "Paper" as above).
  • I can do it, but currently I see a wall of text and I'm unsure of what you want. If you can specify more (current output vs wanted), then I can have a go.
  • @damnation First, In the “presented at” part of the style, drop the prefix and add the conditional logic from the “event” macro in APA (printing genre of present and capitalizing whichever word comes first). Second, format paper-conference like speech if there is no container-title.
  • @damnation thank you!

    That's close. The following citation generated by that stylesheet is correct:

    Bachmann, Ingo. 2010. Sit-Ving vs. sit-and-V: Determinants of variation in the verbal complement of sit. Presented at the ICAME 31, University of Giessen, Germany.

    However, if I add a "Type" (=genre) to the information, it is now doubled:

    Current output:
    Bachmann, Ingo. 2010. Sit-Ving vs. sit-and-V: Determinants of variation in the verbal complement of sit. Poster. Poster presented at the ICAME 31, University of Giessen, Germany.

    Can the first instance of the word "Poster" (=genre) be removed? (I'm not sure if that could possibly cause any issues, but it makes sense to me.)

    Desired output:
    Bachmann, Ingo. 2010. Sit-Ving vs. sit-and-V: Determinants of variation in the verbal complement of sit. Poster presented at the ICAME 31, University of Giessen, Germany.

    --

    Regarding bwiernik's second point, I don't see that functionality yet. (I'm not complaining, just not sure if I missed it or if it hasn't been added.) "Conference Paper" still does not display "Conference Name".
    (I have, however, converted all of my "Conference Paper" unpublished presentations to the "Presentation" type. But this seems to be a problem others have as well.)

    More generally, it is confusing that "Conference Paper">"Conference Name" and "Presentation">"Meeting Name" are not the same variable so switching between those types must be done manually. See the same request here:
    https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/65539/transfer-conference-name-to-meeting-name-when-conference-paper-is-changed-to-presentation/p1
  • edited August 1, 2018
    Fix for the duplicated type/genre problem above:

    Find:
    <if variable="title" match="none"/>
    <else-if type="thesis"/>
    <else>
    <text variable="genre" text-case="capitalize-first"/>
    </else>

    Replace the second line with:
    <else-if type="thesis speech" match="any"/>

    That will suppress the inclusion of genre for presentations. (That is, it will now only appear once, before "presented at...")

    As far as I know, this fixes the critical errors in the current version of the style, so it should be re-released with these changes. I'm not sure what the proper way of doing that is, or if from the replies above this is already in progress.

    Thanks! (And I'm slowly learning to find my way around the style code, still very much trial and error though.)
  • (that looks exactly right to me, yes)
  • edited August 1, 2018
    Thanks.
    I have a PR open for this here: https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/pull/3629

    If you want to suggest your edits next time you can:
    1. go here: https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles
    2. "Find file" and search for the style you want to edit and click on it
    3. Click on the pencil to edit
    4. Change code
    5. Submit for a new Pull Request.
  • Thanks!

    Here's an additional change that might be useful, but goes beyond the basics:
    https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/313791/#Comment_313791

    I think it's useful and fits the style, but I'm not sure if my approach is best practice (splitting the date macro).
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