Random Square brackets in bibliography

edited April 24, 2021
Hello,

I used Zotero for my dissertation and it has been extremely helpful so far. I (stuporously) edited a style for my needs (German law) which worked pretty well in the citations, but not in my bibliography.

I used shortened titles in the citations for encyclopedias and book chapters and added a reference for this shortened citation style in the bibliography in round brackets. It looks like this:

Kirchhoff, Wolfgang, Außerwettbewerbliche Aspekte bei Entscheidungen nach Art. 101 AEUV, insbesondere im Licht der Querschnittsklauseln des AEUV, in: Politischer Einfluss auf Wettbewerbsentscheidungen, Baden-Baden 2015 (zit.: Kirchhoff in: Politischer Einfluss auf Wettbewerbsentscheidungen), 11–14

That's how it looks in the editor preview. In the final document, it changes some (not all) round brackets to square brackets:

[...] Baden-Baden 2015 [zit.: Kirchhoff in: Politischer Einfluss auf Wettbewerbsentscheidungen), 11–14

The code for the reference looks like this:

<group delimiter="">
<text variable="publisher-place" suffix=" "/>
<date date-parts="year" form="text" variable="issued" suffix=" (zit.: ">
<date-part name="year" form="long" suffix=" "/>
</date>
<names variable="" suffix="/">
<name delimiter="; " form="short" initialize-with=""/>
</names>
<text macro="author-note"/> suffix=" " font-style="italic"/>
<text value="in:" suffix=" "/>
<text variable="title" form="short"/>
<text value=")" suffix=""/>
</group>
<text variable="page"/>
</group>


It wouldn't be too bad to change it manually in the final document, but I'd prefer Zotero to handle it. Any idea what went wrong?

(edited a typo)
  • Yeah, citation styles struggle with interpreting opening and closing parentheses that are in different lines. You want to wrap everything from the date line to the text value line in a group and use prefix="(" suffix=")" on that (which is also going to be more robust)
  • Thanks a lot, I'll try that!
  • edited April 25, 2021
    I used the prefix/suffix, removed all the unnecessary code in the process and ended up with something like this:

    group delimiter=" " prefix="(" suffix=")">
    text value="zit.:"/>
    text macro="author-note"/> font-style="italic"/>
    text value="in:" />
    text variable="title" form="short"/>
    /group>

    Strangely, the code didn't show in my post, I had to remove the "<" in all lines.

    Sadly, I still have square brackets, at least they are on both the opening and closing ends now, so it did something:

    Kirchhoff, Wolfgang, Außerwettbewerbliche Aspekte bei Entscheidungen nach Art. 101 AEUV, insbesondere im Licht der Querschnittsklauseln des AEUV, in: Monopolkommission (Hrsg.), Politischer Einfluss auf Wettbewerbsentscheidungen, 1. Auflage, Baden-Baden 2015, S. 11–14 [zit.: Kirchhoff in: Politischer Einfluss auf Wettbewerbsentscheidungen]

    Any other idea what could solve this issue? I changed some other stuff outside of the group as well, I don't know if that could influence the parantheses group.
  • Update for anyone that stumbles upon the same problem: I avoided "group" and the prefix/suffix altogether and just used "text value" for the parentheses, now all my brackets are round. :)

    Zotero works in strange ways. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  • Have you got a link to the rest of your code? There's a few issues in there.

    <date date-parts="year" form="text" variable="issued" suffix=" (zit.: ">
    Is missing the />


    <names variable="" suffix="/">
    <name delimiter="; " form="short" initialize-with=""/>
    </names>

    Has no variable - variable=""
  • Really, do not use text value for parentheses. That isn’t going to work reliably.

    Can you please post your full style with groups to pastebin.com or similar and link here?

    Also be sure that your style validates at https://validator.citationstyles.org/

    To post code bits on these forums, wrap them in <code> </code> tags.
  • Thank you very much for all your efforts!

    I know it's a complete and utter mess, but I'm basically done with my thesis, I'll unlink Citations in a few days and won't add any more literature/citations at that point. It doesn't validate (errors in lines 185, 185-186, 212, 212-213, 236-237), but miraculously, citations and bibliography look fine in the final document. I'm afraid it'll fall apart if I change anything right now.

    Anyway, here's a link to pastebin:

    https://pastebin.com/Hrs6mmkp

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