Inline Citations with number and names

Hi everyone. New to Zotero and utterly overwhelmed by CSL.

I want to edit in-line citations so that they give the citation order and then the author name and date
[1_Hopikins2005]

I can't see any way to even approximate this. Is there a way to tell the In-line citation what to look for? It currently seems all I can do is pick to have footnote like numbers, or author date.

Is there a way to assign other things to the inline citation? Can I make it pick up the file name, or something in the Extra field?
  • Start with an author-date citation, then change the parentheses to square brackets and you have [Holikins 2005]
    Add <text variable="citation-number"/> into the citation section of the style and you have
    [1Holikins 2005] so all left to do is to get the underscore and spaces right, which shouldn't be too hard.

    (All that said... why? I've never seen a citation style like that and there doesn't seem to be any justification for having it)
  • edited September 17, 2019
    Thanks. I'll try that to start.

    Style is specific to a review process.
    Even there it just needs to be a short name that is easy. I'm not sure why, but other than by citation number alone, the inline cites all seem to be weirdly excessive and far too dependent on citation type.

    Is there no reason there isn't a label or short title or some other simple consistent field the inline cites can be aimed at? It feels like making it try to find author date combos just results in nonsense if you are citing anything other than books or journals.

    I hope to eventually have time to try and figure out the logic of CSL so that I can see how it is even trying to make these decisions in the first place. Even the visual editor for the styles seems counter intuitive right now, with no ability to edit how item types appear.

  • You’re looking for a “label” or “trigraph” style.

    Just set your citation layout to be:
    <layout prefix="[" suffix="]" delimiter="; ">
    <group delimiter=", ">
    <text variable="citation-label"/>
    <group>
    <label variable="locator" form="short"/>
    <text variable="locator"/>
    </group>
    </group>
    </layout>


    See for an example https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/blob/master/din-1505-2-alphanumeric.csl
  • Thanks.

    Although I also noticed that basically no imports fill out the Short Title by default and using a Short Title we specify would probably work fine.

    Looking at your code above, does layout just put everything you enter in order until ? (That is my brutally rudimentary understanding of XML, but am quite aware that I know just enough to know I know nothing.)
  • I'd stay away from short title. That's used in a fair number of citation styles.
  • >> Looking at your code above, does layout just put everything you enter in order until ? (That is my brutally rudimentary understanding of XML, but am quite aware that I know just enough to know I know nothing.)

    Generally, yes.
    Print this field, then this field, then this field.
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