Full date in text before title only for one type of document

Hi, everyone (first post btw, so I'm sorry for any mistakes)

I looked for a solution but couldn't find an existing thread. I am working with a style called Spanish Legal (https://www.zotero.org/styles?q=spanish legal). (Actually a modified version I did myself with minor changes like reversing First Name-Surname order, changing quotation marks to guillemets etc.)

I want to be able to put the date information in full (day, month, year) and in text form ("28 of June of 2020") right after the author name and before the title of the document, but only for a specific type of document like "hearing", so that for all other documents (books, chapters...) the title appears after the author as usual, is this feasible?

Note: I use "hearing" as the type of document to reference case law, since it's easy for me to use the "publisher" field for the ECLI code used in case law in Europe. That way I have the title for that case in italics and that ECLI code in normal script.

  • Yes, just use a choose element:

    <choose>
    <if type="hearing">
    ...
    </if>
    <else>
    ...
    </else>
    </choose>


    In this case though, I would recommend storing this as a case like any other and using a field like Loc. In Archive (`archive_location`) to store the ELCI.
  • Thank you for your answer @bwiernik. I've only done minor edits to a style in the past, so I don't know how to implement this change, do you know good resources that teach the basics so I learn how to do that?
  • I’d suggest using the Visual Editor. See instructions for that or editing by hand here https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/style_editing_step-by-step
  • After a lot of trial and error using the left pane of the visual editor (I hadn't used that feature before, since the minor changes I did were all done using the bottom half on the main pane) I managed to get what I wanted.

    I added an "else-if legal_case" with the data "author - date - title - abstract" in that order. I couldn't find "archive_location" in the visual editor as suggested above, but since I never use the abstract field anyway I might as well use it for the code identifier.
  • Can you post your edited style to hastebin.com and give a link here? I can edit the style and put archive_location in
  • Hope it works and thank you for your help

    https://hastebin.com/esekiwozic.xml

    So since I started with minor changes and didn't distribute the style, it still has the original author's name, should I try to upload this modified version to the repository with my changes so other people can access it if they want to? The changes were done to comply with the style guide for my Master and Bachelor thesis at my Law School, and from what I've seen this version is more used than the one the original style had, but I don't know how to go about the distributing of a new style or even if I should do it
  • Is this style for a specific publisher or journal?
  • Not really. It is called the "traditional" style in the Law field, some journals do use a standard style. Usually there are minor variations between what is considered the "traditional" style. For example, and I looked this up just now so I am sure there are other examples, a certain journal of civil jurisdiction law uses "publisher" before "place of publishing" and another journal of international law does it in reverse order.

    style guides
    Civil
    https://www.nreg.es/ojs/Hoja-de-estilo.pdf

    International
    http://www.revista-redi.es/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Normas-de-publicación-en-REDI-1.10.2018.pdf

    But if you look at specialised legal texts they all tend to follow the footnote rule (rarely endnotes and never within the main text) and more or less "author" in small-caps (or caps) followed by first name (abbreviated or not), "title" in italics, "publisher", "place of publishing", "year" for books.

    It took me a while to find the original style I then modified, and I think it's the only one that remotely resembles this style used in the legal field in Spain, so maybe another variation would be welcome in the repository.
  • One note, if you are doing legal citation, you probably want to use Jursim, a version of Zotero with much expanded legal citation support. https://juris-m.github.io
  • Yes, I came across it when I first set up Zotero. I downloaded it and tried it with half a dozen references, I found that the chrome plug-in works the same as the Zotero one and I don't have a need for so many fields to fill in with information for my referencing of either case law or legislation, so I'm sticking with Zotero proper, at least for now.
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