Correction request - Journal of General Virology

I found several errors in the Journal of General Virology style. The reference site for the journal is below:

http://vir.sgmjournals.org/misc/ifora.shtml#references

- in text there can be maximum of 2 authors per reference (ex. Barnes & Nobles, 2002). Three or more should be referenced as (Barnes et al., 2002) with "et al." italicized. The example in zotero with 4 authors in text is absolutely incorrect.

- in multiple references in text the order should be either alphabetical or chronological (but consistent). Currently it seems that the order in zotero is alphabetical but it doesn't seem reliable seeing as too many authors get listed in the in text citations

- when the reference is used multiple times throughout the manuscript, sometimes zotero will start adding the authors FIRST name to the in text citation, ex. (Lu et al., 1995; Min, S. Li, Sen, & Robert M Krug, 2007; S. Li, Min, Robert M Krug, & Sen, 2006). This is absolutely incorrect for this Journal.

If possible, I would greatly appreciate this corrected soon. My manuscript is due tomorrow and I would hate to have to do it by hand or transfer all references to another program (would be an amazing waste of time :)

THANK YOU!!!
  • I'm off to a conference tomorrow, so won't get to this, but:

    1) change
    the et al option in the citation section to
    <option name="et-al-min" value="3"/>
    see
    http://www.zotero.org/support/csl_simple_edits
    for instructions

    2) I thought the style does this correctly, look at the <sort> part of the citation section to check.

    3) http://www.zotero.org/support/kb/given_name_disambiguation
  • Re 1) and 2) - Thanks, I'll try to do that.

    Re. 3) - I don't know how this is relevant in this case (but maybe I'm confused). Zotero should use last names ONLY in the in text citations, regardless of given name disambiguation. What difference does it make if the database has "R.M. Krug", "RM Krug", or "Robert M. Krug", if all that should be displayed is "Krug"?
  • how would you distinguish between an article published by Robert Krug in 1999 and and article published by Martin Krug in 1999?

    My guess would be that the style would require you to add initials for these authors.
    That's the general idea here. Zotero is a bit more rigorous about this than many styles want and improvements are forthcoming
    If that's not the case or you don't want this at work, take out
    <option name="disambiguate-add-givenname" value="true"/>
    from the bibliography section.
  • I was just looking into that in the editing section. Thanks for all your help!
  • Ok, so I got the in text references to work fine now.

    However, the Bibliography is a complete mess! Instead of:

    Hannoun, C., Norder, H. & Lindh, M. (2000). An aberrant genotype revealed in recombinant hepatitis B virus strains from Vietnam. J Gen Virol 81, 2267–2272.

    Zotero spits out something like this:

    Hannoun, C., Norder, H., & Lindh, M. (2000). An aberrant genotype revealed in recombinant hepatitis B virus strains from Vietnam 81, 2267-2272.

    Notice the lack of Journal name, which should be before the issue and italicized.

    Also very often it ads sth like this at the end:

    doi: 10.1038/nature06042.

    Which should not be there!

    Everything seems to be wrong with this style... Can anyone help with the Bibliography?
  • Bump.

    I'm not sure if it's important for the styles to work correctly in zotero, but this one is still a complete mess. I had to manually switch to endnote before submission to get the bibliography and references correct (correct order of authors and italicized et al. in text, correct bibliography format and order), but I still have several draft manuscripts with zotero annotations that I would hate to have to manually convert to endnote as well.

    It would be so nice if someone looked into this. Oh, and thank you Adam for all your help so far.
  • I have this on my radar but might take some time - I need to track down if the entire SGM style is wrong or if this is specific to J Gen Vir
  • I might be able to take a look at the style in the next week or two. All SGM journals seem to use the same reference style, although it's rather sparsely documented.
  • I made some corrections (it might a moment for the new style to show up in the style repository: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/9786/mla-style-for-journals-is-incorrect/?Focus=46124#Comment_46124 ). Note that this style has some requirements which require CSL 1.0 (Zotero 2.1).
  • I updated the Society for General Microbiology style, which should correct quite a few things.
  • Whoops, wrong account. Previous post is mine.
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