Adding "near-note-position" to a style

Hi there,

I'm trying to create/modify a style to work according to the guidelines of a publication series published by my institute. The guidelines state that all citations must be in footnotes (not a problem) and employ ibid., where cites following one another refer to the same item. This is where it gets tricky.
My problem specifically is to get the style to function properly according to ibid/ibid-with-locator specifics, when the two cites are separated by a commenting footnote that does not contain a citation, something like this:

1) Abaelardus, Dialectica, pp. 5-7.
2) Ibid., p. 33.
3) Ibid.
4) That means bla bla bla
5) Ibid., p. 3-4.

I thought the way forward was to nest ibid/ibid-with-locator within near-note (I added near-note-distance="5" at the beginning of the citation section). My first attempt was as follows:


<if position="near-note">
<choose>
<if position="ibid-with-locator">
<group delimiter=", ">
<text term="ibid"/>
<text macro="point-locators-subsequent"/>
</group>
</if>
<else-if position="ibid">
<text term="ibid"/>
</else-if>
</choose>
</if>


This didn't work, yielding [CSL STYLE ERROR: reference with no printed form.] whenever the two notes are not immediately adjacent. I kinda understand why that happens (since position=ibid/ibid-with-locator only look the immediately preceding not, I guess, but how do I solve this?
If I add lines of position=subsequent, I could of course set the text term as ibid, etc., like adding the following lines of the section of "position=ibid"":


<else-if position="subsequent">
<group delimiter=", ">
<text term="ibid"/>
<text macro="point-locators-subsequent"/>
</group>
</else-if>


This works insofar as it "writes" ibid. up until a distance of notes. But how can I then make distinctions, depending on whether the cite has a locator being identical or different from the preceding citation or doesn't have any locator at all? Plus, it doesn't work when there is a note containing a different citation. Nesting "position="near-note"" within the ibid/ibid-with-locator section doesn't work either.
So how can I make ibid/ibid-with-locator work together with near-note-distance=5 correctly, so that there can be commenting footnotes between two citations and ibid still working, but any intervening different citation triggering subsequent rules?

Many thanks in advance!

Daniel

  • You can't, sorry. Ibid refers to the immediately preceding footnote and CSL has no functionality to test "the last formal citation was to the same item".

    (It's also quite confusing and a disservice to readers, which is why I'm not aware of any style guide that would require or even request such usage. I'm not saying it's not required in your case, but I am saying that whoever generated the style guide in question did not think this through).
  • Oh, ok ... I was afraid that might be the case. But thanks for clearing that up! Much appreciated.

    I do agree that this requirement is confusing and a disservice to readers. It is one of the points I raised several times with the responsible people on the editing board. I think I will raise it again. Especially when the intervening footnotes are very long, you have to turn back a few pages to find the actual reference.
    Personally, I don't like ibid anyway and prefer Author-Date styles.

    Out of curiosity: what is the near-note-rule used for? My guess is, it allows for short-title variants of subsequent citations within the given distance?
    Because there is only a small number of styles that actually utilize near-note and mostly for restricting ibid to citations of the same item within the same footnote.

    Thanks again,
    Daniel
  • My recollection is that this was introduced for (mainly legal) citation styles that only use the short form of a citation if the previous mention of an item was "recent".
    But as you note, it hasn't turned out to be a much-used feature in existing styles.
  • Ah, I see. Thanks for clearing that up!
  • I run this by our series-editor and turns out, there was a misunderstanding and an inaccuracy in the style explanations.
    Turns out, the ibid-rule as implement in csl/Zotero is exactly as he/we want it.

    Thanks again!
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