Citation Style help needed - Anthropology (AAA)

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  • adamsmith
    Michael - I'm not involved with either the csl processor or its Zotero implementation, but Frank Bennett elsewhere has mentioned January next year as the goal for the processor, which would then still have to be implemented in Zotero (although the two projects communicating, so that might go pretty smoothly) - to give you some idea of a time frame.

    In addition to my lack of actual involvement, take the unpredictability of programming progress as an additional caveat.
  • cmbarton
    Thanks for the information. At least we know not to hold our breath for the current release.

    Michael
  • scottmatter
    I've got a couple things to add to this discussion (although please let me know if it's not the correct place).

    The first is that I seem to recall a few weeks or months ago, a note somewhere that the new CSL processor was available and was able to handle some of the AAA citation style issues (e.g., omitting next author, tab spaces and hanging indents, etc). I can't seem to find that post again, but I wanted to check and see if any progress has since been made on completing a AAA style. I'm currently in the final throes of writing my dissertation (well, final three months...) and would love to be able to use AAA style to be disciplinarily consistent.

    The second is a related issue: I'm citing some magazine and newspaper articles in my thesis, none of which has an author (for a popular reference, think of the Economist). I've got a number of these, from different sources on different dates, all in October 1993. AAA style dictates that the citations include the month and date, as well as the year, both in text and in the bibliography.

    Agence France Presse
    1993 Four Killed in Tribal Clashes in Southwestern Kenya. October 14.
    1993 Ethnic Clashes Kill 15 in Narok, Kenya. October 17.
    BBC
    1993 Narok District fighting: DC Says Area Now Calm; Police Say 17
    Confirmed Dead. October 20.
    Daily Nation
    1993 Fighting in Narok Leaves Four Dead. Nairobi, Kenya. October 14.
    1993 Man Killed in New Narok Clash. Nairobi, Kenya. October 16.

    So far, I've been using ASA as a style similar to AAA and it gives me only the year in in-text citations, I think because the entry in Zotero doesn't include and author, and ASA style doesn't use the publication as a replacement. I can easily add the publication as a prefix to the in-text citation, but there's a problem when it comes to disambiguation. My in-text citations should look something like this:
    (AFP 1993a, 1993b; BBC 1993; Daily Nation 1993a, 1993b).
    Instead, what I get is something like this:
    (AFP 1993a, 1993c; BBC 1993; Daily Nation 1993b, 1993d), in which the articles are disambiguated in alphabetical order, but not by publication.

    Any thoughts/advice on how to avoid this while using ASA as a substitute for AAA would be appreciated. Obviously this is something that the AAA style will have to deal with as well...

    thanks!
  • adamsmith
    while the new processor is done, it's not yet implemented in Zotero - afaik, no styles have been written yet for this csl 1.0
    see here for the new language and the citeproc processor:
    citationstyles.org/2010/03/22/citation-style-language-1-0/

    you'd have to slightly change ASA to accommodate what you need - it's certainly possible - maybe you can look at one of the styles (I think Chicago author-date) that does use title as a replacement for guidance.
  • fbennett
    edited May 12, 2010
    No guarantees, but give this a spin and see if it does something useful (download the style file via the "raw" link).

    http://gist.github.com/399263

    It's just a rough shot at the problem; the only change from mainstream ASA is at line 50. Good luck!

    (Edit: there's a sticking point in that Zotero/CSL doesn't have a means of short-forming the publication name.)
  • fbennett
    Just tacking on to what adamsmith said:
    while the new processor is done, it's not yet implemented in Zotero - afaik, no styles have been written yet for this csl 1.0
    CSL 0.8 styles can be converted to CSL 1.0 format; so after the upgrade, it will be possible to refine the existing styles using CSL 1.0 features.
  • scottmatter
    @fbennet,

    thanks, I'll give that a shot. Still crossing my fingers for things to fall into place so there's a AAA style before my August thesis submission deadline!
  • seantmitch
    Hi All, To those who have been working on creating a working AAA style for Zotero: thank you very much.

    Has there been any progress? I've been using the style that James posted in Box.net, which is good, except for the problems already mentioned. Cmbarton's style is also good, and the bibliography can be reformatted with some "search and replace," as he points out (though the style uses commas in the parenthetical citations, rather than the colons that AAA requires). Both of these styles, however, require a lot of manual cleaning up before a paper looks like an AAA formatted paper.

    Is there anything better out there at this point? Thanks, again, to all those who have dedicated labor to this.
  • bdarcus
    It's been awhile, but I think we added better support for AAA in CSL 1.0. I believe one of the examples on this demo page is similar?

    http://gsl-nagoya-u.net/http/pub/citeproc-demo/demo.html
  • adamsmith
    csl 1.0 is out and used in the beta version of Zotero - so if you're using the beta version it would probably be possible to get AAA right - but someone would have to do it.
  • seantmitch
    The example under the heading, "Per-author publication listing," on the demo page looks good (except in AAA, the author's name isn't in bold). I'm reluctant to subject my time-sensitive writing projects to the beta (perhaps I'll try later on a different computer than the one I'm writing on). Is there a known rough ETA of the new CSL's availability in a non-beta version? Thanks again!
  • bdarcus
    What's the ETA on your writing project? Can't you just continue to work on it using your current zotero install, then upgrade (likely pretty soon) when 2.1 goes final?
  • seantmitch
    "Likely pretty soon" sounds good. If I submit a few things before 2.1 goes final, I'll clean them up manually. It's good to know that a working AAA style should be coming out soon. Thanks again for a great research tool.
  • adamsmith
    Even if it's not out of beta when you have to submit, you could do exactly what you suggest - install the beta and its plugin on a different computer, copy your database and use that on a copy of your paper - most likely that would work.
    Note, though, that someone actually has to do the work on the AAA style - this won't be fixed automatically.
  • seantmitch
    Thanks for the help.
  • seantmitch
    I see that 2.1 has officially been released. Great news. Has anyone developed an AAA style with the new format at this point? Or is there anything usable that looks like the "Per-author publication listing," on http://gsl-nagoya-u.net/http/pub/citeproc-demo/demo.html ? This is extremely close to AAA. Thanks a lot!
  • adamsmith
    no such development yet, no. How much would need to change from the styles by barton and mark above? Is it just the spacing/repeat author? That can be done quickly.
  • seantmitch
    cmbarton's is pretty good and it actually seems to get the repeat author right, as far as I can tell. The problems that I see in it are 1) the spacing and indentation and 2) that it uses a comma/space, rather than colon/no space. Thanks very much.
  • adamsmith
    ok - the spacing wasn't possible when s/he did the style should be easy enough now - could you give me examples for the comma/space colon/no space thing? Are there different AAA styles or is that just wrong the way its done in the exiting style?
  • seantmitch
    I appreciate that you are looking into this and I apologize that I don't have the technical know-how to do it myself. All AAA styles use colons/no space rather than commas/space (as cmbarton's currently uses, and as styles such as Chicago use). So, for example, a citation that should appear (Sahlins 1985:73) appears (Sahlins 1985, 73). This is not a problem in the bibliography, of course, but in the in-text citation. Thanks again.
  • adamsmith
    oh, ok piece of cake that - should have this done within a couple of days.
  • seantmitch
    Thanks!
  • seantmitch
    Hi Adamsmith, Have you been able to reformat the AAA style? Thanks a lot!
  • adamsmith
    thanks for the reminder - I'll do it tonight. Sorry for the delay.
  • seantmitch
    Again, I really appreciate it.
  • adamsmith
    OK, I grew tired of testing the formatting, maybe you can help me out?
    Take these two styles for a spin - ideally, try to use them with the word processor plugin (which I currently don't have installed for complicated reasons). They have different IDs and slightly different titels, so it's OK to install them both at the same time. Let me know what you find and which works better - the colon vs. comma issue should be fixed in both.

    https://gist.github.com/917061

    https://gist.github.com/917063
  • seantmitch
    Thanks, adamsmith. I'll check these out this evening (or possibly, tomorrow) and let you know how they work.
  • seantmitch
    Hi, adamsmith. I'm embarrassed to admit that I don't know how to load these onto Zotero. Each link takes me to an html page with a script on it that I'm not sure what to do with. Those pages do include download links, but unzipping those doesn't yield a csl file, which is what I understand is needed. How does one access the csl files? Thanks.
  • fbennett
    Click on the "raw" link in the gist page, the use the "Save page as" option (under the File menu of your browser) to save the document to your desktop. Then drag the file into Firefox and drop it there (left-mouse-press, drag, left-mouse-release). In Zotero 2.1.6 that will install the style. In earlier versions, you may need to rename the file from "mystyle-whatever.csl.txt" to "mystyle-whatever.csl" before dragging it to Firefox.
  • seantmitch
    Thanks, fbennet. That did it. Adamsmith, as far as I can tell the "American Anthropological Association" style (not the "block indent" one) looks very close, and the colon/comma issue is fixed. I tried them with the Word plugin. Here's a pdf of how the one named "American Anthropological Association" looks in Word: http://www.box.net/shared/kearf3ff99 . The only difference between this and the AAA style that I can identify is that citations that go on for multiple lines after the Author's name should be indented for each of those additional lines. As it is, after the indent on the line with the date, any additional lines of citation are lined up on the left with the author's name, which isn't what the AAA looks like. If you can fix that, though, these should be ready for submission to AAA journals--for which I thank you very much!

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