John Benjamins edited volume style(s)?

John Benjamins has its own idiosyncratic style for edited volumes, and actually it seems to vary by series. Oddly they say that it's similar to Chicago or APA5, but it's quite distinct in the formatting details and punctuation although also author-date.

Zotero has one CSL style for this purpose: https://www.zotero.org/styles?q=john benjamins
Also discussed here: http://ideophone.org/john-benjamins-collective-volumes-linguistics-csl-style/

However, some details of that style are a bit odd (like forced in-text disambiguation even if only an editor for a work in a different years happens to have the same last name as the author I'm citing), and I'm not sure it matches exactly the specifications here:
https://benjamins.com/catalog/la

So my first question is whether this should be corrected or split into multiple styles for different John Benjamins book series. And my second question is how to best do that.

I'm working on a book chapter draft now, so I'd like to sort this out if possible.
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  • I think we´d want to match the style currently on the repository to the (PDF) stylesheet linked in the documentation. Where the current CSL doesn't match that, we'd take a PR.

    If there are distinct styles e.g. by series, we'd have to do multiple styles, alas. We'd have to figure out naming, but that shouldn't be too hard
  • It's taken me some time to return to this, but the current style is definitely not correct. It's broadly similar (e.g. ordering of elements) but inconsistent in many details.

    Here's a comparison:

    Their examples:
    Anderson, Bruce. 2002. The Fundamental Equivalence of Native and Interlanguage Grammars: Evidence from Argument Licensing and Adjective Position. PhD dissertation, Indiana University.
    Baker, Mark. 1988. Incorporation. A Theory of Grammatical Function Changing. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.
    Bennis, Hans, Corver, Norbert & den Dikken, Marcel. 1998. Predication in nominal phrases. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 1(1): 85-117.
    Bobaljik, Jonathan D. & Wurmbrand, Susi. 2002. Notes on agreement in Itelmen. Linguistic Discovery 1(1). <http://linguistic-discovery.dartmouth.edu>;
    Liberman, Mark. 2006. Uptalk is not HRT. Language Log, 28 March 2006, <http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002967.html>; (30 March 2006).
    Lohndal, Terje. 2007. On the structure and development of nominal phrases in Norwegian. In Nominal Determination. Typology, Context Constraints, and Historical Emergence [Studies in Language Companion Series 89], Elizabeth Stark, Elizabeth Leiss & Werner Abraham (eds), 285-308. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
    van Kemenade, Ans & Vincent, Nigel (eds). 1997. Parameters of Morphosyntactic Change. Cambridge: CUP.


    Exactly that same information entered into Zotero as-is then generated with the current John Benjamins Publishing Company – collective volumes style:
    Anderson, B. 2002. The Fundamental Equivalence of Native and Interlanguage Grammars: Evidence from Argument Licensing and Adjective Position. PhD dissertation, Indiana University.
    Baker, M. 1988. Incorporation. A Theory of Grammatical Function Changing. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.
    Bennis, H., Corver, N. and Dikken, M. den. 1998. Predication in Nominal Phrases. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 1: 85–117.
    Bobaljik, J.D. and Wurmbrand, S. 2002. Notes on Agreement in Itelmen. Linguistic Discovery 1. http://linguistic-discovery.dartmouth.edu.
    Liberman, M. 2006. Uptalk Is Not HRT. Language Log. March 28, 2006. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002967.html.
    Lohndal, T. 2007. On the Structure and Development of Nominal Phrases in Norwegian. In Nominal Determination. Typology, Context Constraints, and Historical Emergence, edited by E. Stark, E. Leiss, and W. Abraham, 285–308. Studies in Language Companion Series 89. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
    Kemenade, A. van and Vincent, N., eds. 1997. Parameters of Morphosyntactic Change. Cambridge: CUP.


    I've only omitted italics for book/journal titles for convenience posting here, but that's the same for both anyway.

    Other than that, I think there are also some weird settings in the style for less common reference types (beyond their basic examples) from my earlier testing, but that can be dealt with later.

    Is the next step then to correct this and change the style? John Benjamins notes that not all book series have the same style, but they also claim this is (similar to?) Chicago and/or APA, but it's clearly not. My guess is that the style above is trying to match this stylesheet but just didn't get every detail correct, rather than representing a slight variant for another book series. (What I'm working with is for the field of Linguistics, and the author of the original style was also a linguist, rather than working in another field where it would be more likely to be intended as a distinct style I imagine.)
  • My guess is that the style above is trying to match this stylesheet but just didn't get every detail correct, rather than representing a slight variant for another book series.
    Yes, I think that's likely, but even if that's not the case that's the assumption we'd be working from. That's why we insist on having documentation for styles. So yes, a PR against the current style would be the next step.
  • OK, thanks. (I also replied to the blog post announcing this style, in case that helps us understand whether it's meant to be the same or not.)

    Would it be appropriate to request someone more knowledgeable about CSL make these changes for me? I can try to pick at it until it works but I'm not confident even then that I would have made the changes in the best way, and some of these seem like substantial shifts in the structure.
  • edited December 10, 2019
    I've inspected the differences, and here's a list of required changes:
    1. Full first names instead of initials (for authors and editors).
    2. Ampersand instead of 'and' for joining names; no oxford comma.
    3. Journal article titles should not be made into sentence case.
    4. Journal issue number should appear following (no space) the volume number, in parentheses.
    5. URLs must be within angle brackets.
    6. Website title should be followed with comma (not period) before the date.
    7. Website date should be in DD Month YYYY format (currently Month DD, YYYY).
    8. Access date (if available) must be added after URLs: in parentheses and also in DD Month YYYY format.
    9. Edited volumes require (eds) as a suffix to the list of editor names, rather than edited by as a prefix.
    10. Book series title and number should appear in (straight) brackets, and should be placed immediately following the book title, followed by a comma then the list of editors names.
    11. Particles like van in names should remain as part of the last name (before the comma). (Note that JB is a Dutch publisher, so I would assume they know what they're doing with this, even though it's a complicated topic.)
    (12. The John Benjamins website uses a hyphen character instead of n-dash for the page range, but I suppose that can be ignored?)

    That's all I see for the moment. I can check some more variable references later to see if anything looks odd beyond these demo examples.
  • I did some testing of other formats to locate any inconsistencies. I just noticed these:

    1. The "presented by" of conference presentations should be Sentence case if needed (if not preceded by a type; I assume that's what is happening).
    2. All dates (e.g., repeated dates with presentations) should follow the same format as above.
  • edited December 10, 2019
    Wonderful, thank you for doing that so quickly!

    Here are the remaining or new changes I see:
    2. No Oxford comma in lists of three or more names. Only & (not , &).
    3. Journal article titles should not be made into Title Case. [My error above!]
    4. Journal volume number and issue number should not be separated with a space.
    5. There should be NO period at the end of the line when it ends with a URL, just closing angle bracket. (There should be a dot after the accessed date if that is present, however.)
    6. Website title should be followed with comma (not period) before the date. Website title should also be in italics.
    6b. The accessed date for the website now duplicates the year rather than including the day. The required format is DD Month YYYY (no commas).
    10. Book series title and number should appear in (straight) brackets, and should be placed immediately following the book title, followed by a comma then the list of editors names.
    11. Particles should be part inverted with the last name. The examples they give are van Kemenade, Ans and den Dikken, Marcel.
  • Hi,

    Something is strange here, as some of those things you request now have already been changed.
    Also, which guidelines are you basing this on?
    For example for journal articles I certainly see a space between volume and issue.

    Thomas, A. R. 1987. “A spoken standard for Welsh: Description and pedagogy”.
    International Journal of the Sociology of Language 66 (4): 99-113.
  • Hi all, good to see these updates. I think a split may be in order. I strongly suspect that John Benjamins may have several poorly disambiguated and similarly named variants of their stylesheet for collective volumes floating around. My original git pull request has a thread linking to the one that we based it on (https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/pull/3772)

    That one does have initialised names instead of full, and "and" instead of & for multiple authors. So the changes that have been made to make it conform to the Linguistik Aktuell series should really be clearly tagged as fitting that series.

    And Benjamins should get their act together and start using different titles! This means that in hindsight, the title we chose for the first style, even though it was the title mentioned on the stylesheet itself, is too general, and may need to be modified to account only for the particular series the stylesheet was nicked from (Iconicity in Language and Literature). How annoying.
  • edited December 11, 2019
    @mark thank you for joining us and helping to clarify the situation. I agree with everything that you said.

    @damnation sorry for the confusion! Let's clarify:
    1. As mark just pointed out, this should be split, because there are multiple distinct edited volume styles from this publisher (two or more, even in the same field). Does it make sense to name these according to book series then let others who wish to use them see if they also match up with the expectations for other series?
    2. The guidelines are linked in the first post. Thomas 1987 is not given as an example there. The examples are copied in my post above and available here: https://benjamins.com/catalog/la (click 'guidelines' and scroll down).
    3. Secondarily, yes it seems like I did not get all of the changes you made. I did get some, but not all. Are you sure you linked to your latest version? If so, is there some explanation for why I'd end up with a partially updated style when testing it? (Note: I updated it simply by modifying the CSL file in my Zotero/styles folder then restarting Zotero. If there's a better way to do that, let me know. That should be OK for testing though I'd imagine.)
  • edited December 13, 2019
    @damnation Should I make a new request for the John Benjamins Linguistik Aktuell style? Or is that already in progress with this discussion. No rush, I just wasn't sure if I should do something else at this point.
  • It can be in this thread.
    But to be honest, I'm confused and motivation is low to figure this out.
  • There are two distinct style requirements from John Benjamins, for different book series. Just consider this a new request.

    Guidelines: https://benjamins.com/catalog/la ('guidelines', scroll down)

    Do you also want the standard Zotero reference items formatted in this way for reference?

    --

    Additionally, the current "John Benjamins Publishing Company – collective volumes" style needs to be renamed for the specific series "[John Benjamins] Iconicity in Language and Literature".
  • (Bump. Or should I start a new thread requesting the new/different style?)
  • edited January 23, 2020
    I saw some PRs for these styles. Check the repository for the styles (both) and their dates.
  • edited January 23, 2020
    Thank you!
    (Edit: I made a mistake in checking this. Looking it over again. Removed my original reply because it was inaccurate.)
  • edited January 23, 2020
    The following minor changes are required for John Benjamins Publishing Company - Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today

    1. Non-dropping particles van, den, etc. should be inverted with the last name, and also used for alphabetizing. That is, van Kemenade, Ans should be near the end alphabetically.

    2. No space between journal volume and issue: 1(1)

    3. No final period/full stop at the end of an entry that ends with a URL. (The period should be there at the end of all other entries, including when there is an access date. So only when the citation ends with > should the period be omitted.)

    4. Access (and other?) dates should be in the format (DD Month YYYY). Currently there is a typo so the result is for example (2006 March 2006) with doubled year.

    5. There should be no final 'Oxford' comma before & in the list of editors (for a book chapter).

    6. Book series should be in square brackets [], not parentheses.

    7. Article/chapter titles should NOT be title-cased. Leave them as sentence-casing. (But book titles, etc., should be titled-cased.)

    ---

    Additionally, for in-text cites:
    1. Although the stylesheet does not specify this, the use of & in the bibliography suggests it should also be used in cites. I have confirmed this also in a recently published volume in the series.
    2. I also confirmed that the et-al minimum should be 4. Three authors are written out, but 4 are abbreviated First et al.
  • John Benjamins Publishing Company - Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today:

    1. non-dropping-particle: set to "never". Please check if the behaviour is correct now. Not tested.
    2. volume+issue: space removed
    3. remove layout suffix dot and rearrange bib: please check
    4. accessed date: fixed
    5. Didn't see this issue, but made a change. Please check if it's gone.
    6. Changed: please check.
    7. Removed title case.
    8. in-text "and" set to ampersand
    9. Set to et-al-min=5, et-al-use-first=1 settings.

    Please test (right click, save as...): https://raw.githubusercontent.com/citation-style-language/styles/8d166c3800bb086c9aa32e82749730992f54753b/john-benjamins-publishing-company-linguistik-aktuell-linguistics-today.csl

    If you need more fixes, please refer to the numbers from this post. Makes it easier when I come back after editing 10 other styles. ;)
  • Thank you! Very close.

    3. There should be a suffix dot after the access date, but not when the citation ends immediately with the URL plus angle bracket. Is this somewhat inconsistent behavior in the stylesheet possible to encode with Zotero? Basically, if and only if the style ends with an angle bracket ("greater than" symbol), the suffix dot should be omitted.
    3b. There should be commas (not dots) surrounding the webpage creation date, but no commas within the date.
    3c. The webpage creation date (following the website name) should be in DD Month YYYY format.
    Here's an example:
    Liberman, Mark. 2006. Uptalk is not HRT. Language Log, 28 March 2006, <http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002967.html> (30 March 2006).
    3d. The website name ("Language Log") should be italicized.

    9a. et-al-min=4 (not 5)
    9b. et-al-use-first doesn't seem to be working? I see three names, not just the first. (There's also a comma that isn't needed there, but it might disappear when it's the first name then et al.)

    New details I didn't catch before:

    10. The book series in brackets should immediately follow the book title, rather than going after the editors and page numbers. Example:
    Lohndal, Terje. 2007. On the structure and development of nominal phrases in Norwegian. In Nominal Determination. Typology, Context Constraints, and Historical Emergence [Studies in Language Companion Series 89], Elizabeth Stark, Elizabeth Leiss & Werner Abraham (eds), 285-308. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    11. Remove final 'Oxford' comma for in-text cites of three authors. (Bennis, Corver, & den Dikken 1998 should be Bennis, Corver & den Dikken 1998)
  • 3. dot only after access date.
    3b. changed some stuff, but not tested. (I'm doing this blind)
    3c. Now I see what you mean. You mean the issued date. Changed.
    (Please check that the date is entered correctly and Zotero recognises the format)
    3d. containter-title website: italicised.

    9a. fixed (I was in between those two numbers. haha)
    9b. Works for me: (Accadia et al. 2012). Please ensure you are using the latest style (check date) and try a new document. Authors are entered correctly?
    10. Moved. (let´s see if this breaks anything else)
    11. Oxford comma removed.

    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/POBrien333/styles/patch-643/john-benjamins-publishing-company-linguistik-aktuell-linguistics-today.csl
  • edited January 26, 2020
    Great, thanks.

    3. There should be a comma before (as well as after) the issued date in blogs. (The format is Title, DD Month YYYY, <URL....)
    [Note: you did add the comma after the date, just need to switch the one before from dot to comma.]
    9b. Works for me: (Accadia et al. 2012). Please ensure you are using the latest style (check date) and try a new document. Authors are entered correctly?
    Huh. Yes, it works now in a new document. OK!

    And that's it. Everything else matches their examples exactly, assuming they don't have any other requirements not specied in the (limited) online guidelines. If more come up I'll post back here.

    Aside from that one small change (dot-to-comma before issued date for webpages), this should be ready to upload and use. Thanks so much for your help with this!
  • edited January 27, 2020
    OK, everything above is fixed, but two small problems were introduced:

    3. Now the final dot is missing from all entries, unless it ends in an accessed date. So it works for the Liberman 2006 webpage cited above, but not for books, articles, etc. The final dot should be omitted if and only if the full entry ends in only <...url...> but is present under any other circumstances.
    (If this is tricky, I could live with it. It's not hard to remove the dot or just to keep it consistent instead of having this exception.)

    3b. There is now a problem for other item types with URLs such as articles. There is not an incorrect comma instead of dot following the volume/issue, as in this (incorrect!) example:
    Bobaljik, Jonathan D. & Wurmbrand, Susi. 2002. Notes on agreement in Itelmen. Linguistic Discovery 1(1), <http://linguistic-discovery.dartmouth.edu>
    Otherwise, the output is identical to the examples.

    (If it would help for testing I could upload the Zotero entries for the John Benjamins example items.)
  • @adamsmith , I am kinda stuck with this one and not sure how to solve this one. The access Macro is quite fragmented and I am not sure how to achieve a comma for some and a dot suffix for others.
    (https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/blob/master/john-benjamins-publishing-company-linguistik-aktuell-linguistics-today.csl)
  • How about some version of this:
    <choose>
    <if variable="DOI URL" match="none">
    <text value="."/>
    </if>
    </choose>


    Not super elegant, but the alternative I think would be to essentially duplicate the code for the bibliography.
  • Question: if that final comma alternation is hard to implement (I agree it's odd in the style), could the style just be saved to the repository as-is, and then the publisher can make the minimal changes if needed in the edge cases?
  • @damnation -- does the above work? Do you just want to go with that? I agree that it'd be nice to have the style available.
  • edited March 4, 2020
    @djross3
    Struggling to get my head back into this style a month later.
    Please check and let us know: https://www.zotero.org/styles?q=id:john-benjamins-publishing-company-linguistik-aktuell-linguistics-today
  • edited March 6, 2020
    Thank you very much for this. Almost identical to the style guide now. One change away!

    Continuing the numbering above:
    3. This is fixed. The final dot appears correctly in all entries (except where it should be avoided).
    3b. This is NOT fixed. There's an invariable comma that should be a dot except in electronic sources. See below:

    Style guide:
    Articles (in journal):
    Bobaljik, Jonathan D. & Wurmbrand, Susi. 2002. Notes on agreement in Itelmen. Linguistic Discovery 1(1). <http://linguistic-discovery.dartmouth.edu>;

    Electronic, online sources:
    Liberman, Mark. 2006. Uptalk is not HRT. Language Log, 28 March 2006, <http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002967.html>; (30 March 2006).


    Zotero output:
    Bobaljik, Jonathan D. & Wurmbrand, Susi. 2002. Notes on agreement in Itelmen. Linguistic Discovery 1(1), <http://linguistic-discovery.dartmouth.edu>;

    Liberman, Mark. 2006. Uptalk is not HRT. Language Log, 28 March 2006, <http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002967.html>; (30 March 2006).


    [Note: for some reason the "code" tags on the forum are adding semi-colons after the URLs. Ignore that. There's no problem with that in the style, just how it displays here.]


    So, there should be a distinction based, according to the section headers in the style, on whether there is an accessed date and/or if it's an electronic resource (their example is a blog post).

    My suggestion then would be something like:
    <if variable="accessed" match="none"> ...
    Or you could decide based on whether it's an "electronic, online source", e.g. blog/etc., versus journal article.


    In the end, I stand by what I said earlier: this is an odd inconsistency in the style guide, so if this is too much trouble just uploading the current version would be acceptable, and the editors could fix commas if they wish.
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