Issue with a citation style created with the Simple Style creator

adamsmith · November 4, 2009

OK, so what I would try to do is to test for the presence of an author in chapters and use that to create the encyclopedia style i.e.
<if type="chapter">
<if variable="author">
---formatting for chapter---
</if>
<else>
---formatting for encyclopedia---
</else>
</if>

Not perfect and needs a bit of thought, but unless you have authors in your encyclopedia entries this should do.

Z User · November 8, 2009

Thanks a lot ! It does work.

I only see small imperfections in the output :

- Abbrevations are not always correct, e.g. J. instead of J-.P. for John-Paul.
- the th after the edition number cannot be indivdiually subscripted, variables however can have different font styles. I have found a workaround, I told zotero to insert a special character instead of th and I replace all its occurences by th using the word processor Fnd/Replace tool.

- I know that Zotero is able to manage ibid for consécutive citations. Nevertheless, i would like to achieve the following result - in the sequence A. Martin always is the same person :

A. Martin, My book, Publisher, 2009, n°
P. Smith, Title, Publisher, 2009, n°
A. Martin, opus cited, n°
A Martin, My second book, Publisher, 20009, p. or n°
A. Martin, opus cited, n°
A. Martin, My book, Publisher, 2009, n°
A. Martin, opus cited, n°

- How can I change the locale so that instead of inserting n°. zotero inserts n° after I completed the citation using the Insert citation dialog box of the Open Office plug-in ?

adamsmith · November 8, 2009

The first two issues are known, yes. For the superscript it might also be possible to tweak Ooo to do this right - as you know, there is an Ooo function to automatically superscript th, nd, rd after numbers. There might be a way to have it apply that in citations inserted by Zotero.

For op cit.: Zotero has
position="subsequent"
(see in the CMOS style)
which is for a previously cited, but not immediately preceding item.
You should be able to construct some type of op cit effect with that.

I don't understand the last question. Examples?

Z User · November 8, 2009

Thanks for your quick reply.

Let's say I want to cite n° 84 of the now famous My book by A. Martin.

I click on inserted a citation, select the item. the use the menu to select Number instead of Pages and type 84 in.

I get :

A. Smith, My Book, Publisher, 2009, n°. 84

I would like to get :

A. Smith, My Book, Publisher, 2009, n° 84

Edit : No dot after n° in the result I want to achieve.

I thought the Ibid thing only worked with an immediately preceding item. I will have a look at that.

adamsmith · November 8, 2009

Z User · November 9, 2009

This is just to say that I have applied if position="subsequent" and it works fine although if the same wrote to different pieces of work, the two are mentionned as op. cit. without distinction. It would be nice to have op. cit. applied only to the last reference mentionned.

Example :

A. Martin, My book, Publisher, 2009, n°
A. Martin, opus cited, n° (reference to My book)
A. Martin, opus cited, n° (reference to My book)
A. Martin, My second book, Publisher, 20009, p. or n°
A. Martin, opus cited, n° (reference to My second book)
A. Martin, opus cited, n° (reference to My second book)
A. Martin, My book, Publisher, 2009, n°
A. Martin, opus cited, n° (reference to My book)

However, I now am convinced that mentionning a short title, like in CMOS, instead of op.cit. is both easier to code and perhaps clearer in case of possible ambiguity.

As far the text panel is concerned, I am not sure it"s even worth to change anything since there as a different outputs i.e. pp. for pages, p. for page, n° and so on which sometimes vary from citation to citation therefore typing by hand will allow me to immediately get it right and to check to whole citation. Too much automatization always creates problems with long works since checking and editing footnotes is a boring exercise one tends to overlook.

Once again, thanks for all ! My style is now finished.

Z User · August 23, 2010

I just would like to let you know that today I have found a new reason to use Zotero.
Even if I use French resources most of the time, I also cite articles published in Anglo-saxons periodicals. Zotero allows me to cite Anglo-saxons articles using an appropriate format without modifying the one I use to cite French documents. I am not sure that any other reference manager would allow me to cite French and Anglo-Saxons documents using the same style.

There are some downsides such as the fact that Lexis does not support Zotero but using a flexible tool which can be reshaped according to particular needs which are not necessarily foreseeable is a great plus.