Removal of custom Harvard Style from the Style Repository
Hello,
Dublin City University have a custom Harvard Style available for selection in the style repository. We have since aligned with the Cite Them Right 10th Edition and the continued presence of the DCU style is causing confusion among students. Is it possible to remove this completely from the repository and how might I do so?
Kind Regards,
Ronan
Business Librarian,
Dublin City University
Glasnevin,
Dublin 9
Ireland
Dublin City University have a custom Harvard Style available for selection in the style repository. We have since aligned with the Cite Them Right 10th Edition and the continued presence of the DCU style is causing confusion among students. Is it possible to remove this completely from the repository and how might I do so?
Kind Regards,
Ronan
Business Librarian,
Dublin City University
Glasnevin,
Dublin 9
Ireland
@adamsmith, a removal probably makes more sense here than a redirect, right?
Here's the page from the library that makes the use of CTR pretty clear: https://www.dcu.ie/library/classes_and_tutorials/citingreferencing.shtml
I think the removal makes more sense as we do have an online PDF guide that explicitly mentions the use of Cite Them Right 10th edition.
Yes, that is the page that mentions it. You will also see the link on that page for the Harvard style doc which also mentions the 10th edition.
Best,
Ronan
Not sure how well Mendeley deals with this.
Well, it's virtually unknown in the US, where Zotero is from, and its popularity in the UK and Ireland (sorry!) is comparatively recent. The last time the default styles were updated is five years ago or so.
Perhaps there is precedent to update the styles now? If all of the existing default styles are still relevant, no problem at all. Honestly, if it does not happen, it is fine but I think there is certainly a case that can be made for Cite Them Right to be included as a default given the amount of universities across the UK and Ireland that utilise it.
(Also, while this has no real bearing on the style itself, it's not particularly encouraging that the official site won't load in Firefox — and, very soon, Chrome — because they haven't updated their site certificate after the Symantec distrust.)
Germany and France don't have standard styles, but other countries (like Brazil with ABNT and Russia with GOST) do, so that's a valid concern. What I would say is that we get a _ton_ of people asking about "Harvard" styles still (*sigh*) and that version is as close to a standard "Harvard" style as there currently is. We used to e.g. have "Harvard 1" as a default style for that reason. (just to be clear, I'm mainly thinking aloud here -- I don't have super strong, let alone passionate views on this).
Also, in relation to the default styles that Zotero ships with, is there a list of these anywhere for easy consultation?
Thanks,
Ronan
The list of bundled styles is here: https://github.com/zotero/bundled-styles
Style downloads: all clients
The first list is recent style downloads by the Zotero client — i.e., from people manually adding styles through the Cite pane of the preferences.
The second list is recent style downloads from all clients, which includes downloads from browsers (which might be Zotero users) and downloads from other programs that use this repo. There's a good chance these are somewhat more automated and/or skewed by the default styles in other programs, but they probably give a decent overall picture.
I've added an asterisk next to the styles that are already bundled with Zotero. (For the first list, I assume people are trying to add those either by mistake or for some troubleshooting purpose (like trying to get sentence case from APA?).)
(In the first list, a few styles (e.g., ISO690) are much higher than when checking unique IPs, presumably due to some large single-IP Zotero-using institutions requiring them, but there's less of an effect in the overall list.)
Based on these stats, I've added Cite Them Right to the default set. I've also removed AAA as suggested by adamsmith above, though it won't be removed from existing installs.
We can consider if there are other changes we want to make. For example, we removed AMA from the default set years ago, I think because it was so similar to Vancouver, but people are certainly still trying to use it. ACS is popular, as are ASA and APSA, both of which we used to bundle. We could consider removing Cell, which is way down on the overall list.
@dstillman -- I agree with bwiernik that all your suggestions (add ACS, ASA, AMA, APSA, remove Cell) make sense. We had removed APSA and ASA because they're quite similar to Chicago (author-date), but if people are looking for them, why not add them back in.
Nature also looks like a good candidate for removal (both not used a ton and then the only remaining journal(family)-specific style.) AMA would be a particularly useful substitute since that keeps one superscript-numerical style bundled.
That would be four in, two out, which keeps the total number reasonable.
Cheers.