Upgrade StorageISO 690:2021 and Italicizing Article Titles: How to Implement in Zotero and CSL?
According to ISO 690, when citing a digital journal article, the article title should be italicized instead of the journal title. The reasoning is that the article itself is the most granular and directly locatable resource—especially when it has its own DOI or URL.
However, Zotero doesn't provide a specific item type like "digital journal," which makes it difficult to implement this behavior cleanly in CSL. Using the presence of a DOI to trigger the switch feels unreliable—after all, the DOI is meant to be clicked, not searched by title. The same applies to the URL field.
Workarounds like adding genre or medium in the “Extra” field come with their own limitations. These fields could be used to indicate other characteristics, leading to ambiguity or unwanted side effects in other citation contexts.
Has anyone found a practical way to implement this ISO 690 recommendation in Zotero/CSL? Or is this one of those cases where we have to acknowledge the guideline but stick with the traditional formatting?
However, Zotero doesn't provide a specific item type like "digital journal," which makes it difficult to implement this behavior cleanly in CSL. Using the presence of a DOI to trigger the switch feels unreliable—after all, the DOI is meant to be clicked, not searched by title. The same applies to the URL field.
Workarounds like adding genre or medium in the “Extra” field come with their own limitations. These fields could be used to indicate other characteristics, leading to ambiguity or unwanted side effects in other citation contexts.
Has anyone found a practical way to implement this ISO 690 recommendation in Zotero/CSL? Or is this one of those cases where we have to acknowledge the guideline but stick with the traditional formatting?
It’s a common requirement for styles to mention that an a journal article is ‘published online’, an ‘advance online publication’, or similar if it’s outside a standard journal sequence. I’ve been assuming that if an item is a journal article and has an issue date and DOI, but no volume, issue, supplement, page numbers, or article ID/number, then it’s an article published online.