Bugs with IEEE style

Hi, just would like to report a few possible bugs (and suggested fixes) in the IEEE style when used with the word plug-in to generate a biblography.

(1) no comma after citations with multiple references, eg [1,2] instead of [1, 2] -
I changed the line - <layout prefix="[" suffix="]" delimiter=","> under the section <citation> by adding a space to the comma, ie ", "

(2) extra space in biblography before all occurrences of "vol." -
I deleted the space before vol. in the line <text variable="volume" prefix=" vol. "/>

(3) extra full-stop after the month May for all references in the biblography -
It seems that the IEEE script automatically adds the full stop for all 3-letter month short-forms, eg Feb. Mar. Oct. etc. However, "May." is wrong. An if statement in the script for this exception should solve it.

Regards
Peng
  • Just to add to this list...

    The citation formatting in the IEEE style seems incorrect as well. Multiple references should show as [1], [2], and not [1, 2]. Also, collapsed citations should appear as [1]-[5] and not [1-5].

    At first I thought this was easy to fix by changing the delimiter to "], [" -- but, unfortunately that fixes only the first case above and does not work for the collapsed citations (They still appear as [1-5]). Any hints on how to fix this would be appreciated.
  • The current CSL processor can't handle this, but it will be supported in the new processor, to be deployed in a subsequent version of Zotero (2.1) sometime in the coming year. You can check out a test fixture that shows the processor doing it correctly here.
  • Thanks.

    Any ideas on how the "May." issue can be handled (see first post above by penghuei)? I am not sure I see immediately how this can be fixed in CSL.
  • This will also be addressed by the new processor, or rather by the new version of the CSL language. Instead of attempting to add periods to short forms of the month names (and other terms), the new processor will take them out when they're not needed.

    You might be able to accomplish the same effect in CSL 0.8 by adding a locale block in the style file, redefining the month names used by the style (with periods), and eliminating the add-periods attribute that is producing that stray punctuation. No guarantee that it would be a complete fix, but it might be something to investigate if you're feeling patient and have some time to spend on it.
  • edited February 6, 2010
    It looks like that the current CSL processor can already handle one fix shown on your link, fbennett. In the IEEE style, change:
    <layout prefix="[" suffix="]" delimiter=",">
    <text variable="citation-number"/>
    </layout>

    To:
    <layout delimiter=", ">
    <text prefix="[" suffix="]" variable="citation-number"/>
    </layout>

    This will cause citations previously appearing as "[1,4,5]" to instead look like "[1], [4], [5]". (Confirmed on my system with a custom style fix.) However, it doesn't fix the collapse issue; that has to be dealt with by hand. (Too bad there isn't an option for "collapse delimiter"; you should just set it to "]-[".)

    EDIT: One thing that the above fix doesn't handle well is when you add a custom "suffix" in OpenOffice or MS Word through the Zotero plugin. EG, let's say you want to write "[4 p. 37]". So you put " p. 37" in the suffix section of the citation in the plugin, but you'll end up with "[4] p. 37". (Or you use " p. 37]" to get ""[4] p. 37]".) It looks like you'll still have to manually edit the reference later to fix this issue.

    On a seperate issue with the IEEE style, anyone know how to get it to capitalize "Ed." (for editor) instead of using "ed."? In the IEEE citation style, "Ed." is used for an editor, while "ed." is used for "edition." See:
    http://www.ieee.org/portal/cms_docs_iportals/iportals/publications/authors/transjnl/stylemanual.pdf

    By the way, how would I submit a bug report/suggestion to get the above fix incorporated? I'm not sure what the proper procedure is for a style suggestion, since I just started using Zotero a week ago.
  • depends on how involved you want to get - for an occasional fix you can post a link to an uploaded corrected version of a csl style here on the forum and I or someone else will upload it for you.
    If you want to get more involved you can get an SVN-trac account
    https://www.zotero.org/dev/trac_access
    and submit them yourself through SVN

    For the editor,
    change the line
    <label form="short" prefix=", " text-case="lowercase" suffix="."/>
    (I suppose in both the author and the editor macro)
    so that text-case="capitalize-first"

    Generally, a couple of us monitor the style section of the forum and we'll implement stuff the people point out - e.g. I've just updated the IEEE style according to your report https://www.zotero.org/trac/changeset/5733
    the corrected style won't show up in the section on the top of the repository, but in the lower section as
    http://www.zotero.org/styles/ieee/dev (i.e. with a (dev) at the end).
    From time to time Dan pushes the corrected dev styles into the top section and to clients.
  • edited February 6, 2010
    Great; thanks for the input. I'm planning on using Zotero for my research, so if I can squeeze in time I'll try to modify the style to make the formatting work correctly. I've applied for an SVN account so that I can upload the changes as I go.

    In the meantime, here is a tweaked version of the current IEEE style to fix some of the problems mentioned in this thread:
    http://www.mediafire.com/file/jdgjuvxy2mj/IEEE_mod_sfrank.csl

    Here's a quick summary of what I changed:
    * Lines 29/39: Made the same "capitalize-first" change you made above
    * Line 53: Removed an extra space that was appearing in front of the publisher location
    * Lines 75-76: Changed the suffix/prefix to apply to each individual citation number as opposed to the whole citation (same change you made above) and changed the delimiter to be a comma plus a space, ", " (not changed in your version above)
    * Line 95: Added the prefix "in " to book titles for the book chapter format, as the IEEE style specified that it should read {Article/Chapter Name}, in {Book Name}
    * Line 124: Removed the extra space in front of "vol."

    When/if I have time I'll try to work on the style a bit more, specifically to add a webpage entry. But I'm a graduate student, so time is in short supply.
  • It doesn't look like these changes have been added to the release versions yet. What's the easiest way for me to get the dev version of the csl to get the correct IEEE formatting? Also, any idea when these will be included in an update? It's been several months since they were added to the trunk, so I'm hoping that they'll get included soon.

    Thanks!
  • the version I updated on February 6th is the current one in the repository.
    Some of the changes sfrank suggested haven't been made yet - I figured I'd wait for him to get to this and finish it. There is no more current dev version of the style, else you could just find and install it in the repository
    http://www.zotero.org/styles

    Unfortunately mediafire deletes uploaded files after a while, so you can't get to his more recent edits, but maybe he'll come back and upload it somewhere else.
    But if you tell me exactly what is still wrong I could probably get to updating the style soon-ish.
  • I looked for an IEEE one updated 2010-02-06, but I didn't see it. What's it called? And once I find it, do I just need to click on the "install" link in Firefox and it'll do the rest?
  • it's up top - 9th from the top to be precise - the actual date is 3-14, which is when it was pushed to the clients -
    and yes, just clicking on install and OK when prompted is all you need to do.
  • Just got it and tried it out. There's one problem that still hasn't been fixed. Multiple citations such as [14-15] should be formatted at [14]-[15]. Would you be able to fix this? Thanks for all your help.

    A couple other awesome features would be the following, which are IEEE formatting requirement:
    - Capitalize only the first word in a paper title, except for proper nouns and element symbols.
    - Papers that have not been published should be cited as “unpublished” [4]. Papers that have been accepted for publication, but not yet specified for an issue should be cited as “to be published” [5]. NOTE: perhaps could be added as a piece of metadata in Zotero if it isn't already?
    .
    [4] B. Smith, “An approach to graphs of linear forms (Unpublished work style),” unpublished.
    [5] E. H. Miller, “A note on reflector arrays (Periodical style—Accepted for publication),” IEEE Trans. Antennas Propagat., to be published.

    Template for all Transactions (except IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, IEEE Magnetics Letters and IEEE Photonics Journal), found at http://www.ieee.org/documents/TRANS-JOUR.doc
    Number citations consecutively in square brackets [1]. The sentence punctuation follows the brackets [2]. Multiple references [2], [3] are each numbered with separate brackets [1]–[3]. When citing a section in a book, please give the relevant page numbers [2]. In sentences, refer simply to the reference number, as in [3]. Do not use “Ref. [3]” or “reference [3]” except at the beginning of a sentence: “Reference [3] shows ... .” Please do not use automatic endnotes in Word, rather, type the reference list at the end of the paper using the “References” style.
    Number footnotes separately in superscripts (Insert | Footnote). Place the actual footnote at the bottom of the column in which it is cited; do not put footnotes in the reference list (endnotes). Use letters for table footnotes (see Table I).
    Please note that the references at the end of this document are in the preferred referencing style. Give all authors’ names; do not use “et al.” unless there are six authors or more. Use a space after authors’ initials. Papers that have not been published should be cited as “unpublished” [4]. Papers that have been accepted for publication, but not yet specified for an issue should be cited as “to be published” [5]. Papers that have been submitted for publication should be cited as “submitted for publication” [6]. Please give affiliations and addresses for private communications [7].
    Capitalize only the first word in a paper title, except for proper nouns and element symbols. For papers published in translation journals, please give the English citation first, followed by the original foreign-language citation [8].
  • edited June 7, 2010
    Multiple citations such as [14-15] should be formatted at [14]-[15]. Would you be able to fix this? Thanks for all your help.
    see discussion above - that's not currently possible, will be soon-ish.
    Capitalize only the first word in a paper title, except for proper nouns and element symbols.
    we recommend storing items in Zotero that way - proper conversion into sentence case is basically impossible (there is no way to automatically distinguish proper nouns from regular ones), while automated conversion to title-case works quite well.
    There is an open ticket on facilitating manual conversion to sentence case, using right-click on the title.
    - Papers that have not been published should be cited as “unpublished” [4]. Papers that have been accepted for publication, but not yet specified for an issue should be cited as “to be published” [5]. NOTE: perhaps could be added as a piece of metadata in Zotero if it isn't already?
    there are a couple of discussions on this currently out, but a good solution to this is still a bit away - generally speaking this is very hard to do when you look at it from a broader perspective rather than just for one style. In most cases using the "type" field and the report item type is a pretty good idea, currently that doesn't work for IEEE, but perhaps that could be adjusted (though I'd want to double check that it doesn't conflict with other requirements).
  • edited August 26, 2010
    It has been a while, but I have reworked the IEEE style to a large extent on my personal machine. It now works well for most common item types (books, journal articles, conference papers, websites) but does not have specific coding in place (yet) for more esoteric things (e.g. theses, patents, IEEE standards).

    I don't think I ever did figure out how to commit to the SVN server. Can someone walk me through it or point me to more detailed documentation? Or, I could simply post the updated .csl file here if that would help. It is rather long, though.

    Things I have not been able to work around:
    * Multiple consecutive citations still show up incorrectly, e.g. "[1-5]" instead of "[1]-[5]". However, multiple separated citations work properly, e.g. "[1], [3], [7 p. 34]".
    * Changing the format of a date from IEEE standard (DD-MMM-YYYY, e.g. "01-Aug-2010") to something else when the day is missing but not the month (e.g. "Aug. 2010" instead of "Aug-2010") because I don't know how to use an IF statement check if a specific part of the date is present.
    * Dates in MMM. YYYY format (e.g. "Aug. 2010") won't work correctly for the month of May, which will get a period (as in "May. 2010" when it should be "May 2010").
    * The style can distinguish between published and unpublished conference papers by whether or not a conference proceedings title is given, and will prepend "presented at the" for unpublished papers. Unfortunately, if the proceedings title begins with "The", then you get two "the"s.

    Also, the style as I have it does not address things like "unpublished" or "to be published"; those have to still be worked around manually.
  • I don't have time right now for SVN - but you can upload the style as a public gist on
    gist.github.com

    also, since you last worked on this style we've started to add creative commons licenses to all styles in the repository - please (if you don't mind) add
    <rights>
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
    </rights>
    right above the </info> tag of the style.
  • Ok, I have added the "rights" tag and created a code snippet at: http://gist.github.com/551561.

    I noted that my XML validated fine before adding the "rights" tag, but now that the "rights" tag is in place it does not validate any longer. I'm not sure I put it in the correct place in the XML.

    As I mentioned before, I want to emphasize that not everything is implemented in the updated style. However, it should work better than the previous one for a significant number of citation types.

    (About SVN, I signed up for an account, but haven't been able to find instructions for where specifically the repository is located so I can point to it. I've found the trac stuff, but that seems to just be online summaries of changes.)
  • the rights go a the end of the info section - right above the end info tag </info>
    (actually they go anywhere in the info section - I just thought that'd be easiest to describe.

    The SVN directory is at
    https://www.zotero.org/svn/csl
    I work with a GUI SVN client - Rabbit VCS for linux, Tortoise SVN is for windows and supposedly quite good (both are free and open source).
    Also, this doesn't seem terribly hard from the commandline, especially if you're on linux or mac.
  • Ah, got it. I missed that it was a closing "info" tag; I put it outside of "info". I'll edit the gist. I can try the SVN access again later today or tomorrow.
  • edited August 27, 2010
    OK, it's up, should show up soon.
    (note that the IEEE style on the top of the repository is only updated occasionally - this will be in the (dev) section of the repository.
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