Tuesday, December 09, 2008


Zotero Style

A little while back I mentioned an open source reference software called Zotero. As I said before, the gathering and storing of references works perfectly, but that's only half of what a good reference manager does. The second is facilitating citations and bibliographies during writing. Right now, I'm working in earnest on my next journal article and I'm using the Zotero plugin for Word. It seems to be working well, except that there is no defined reference style for the particular journal I am writing for: Earth and Planetary Science Letters. So of course I took the opportunity to learn Citation Style Language and create my own style file. It was much more difficult than I expected, but I finally got it formatting my citations and bibliography the way they should. So if anybody wants my CSL file, shoot me an email.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why not upload it to the Zotero subversion repository of styles?

Brad De Gregorio said...

Because I've only created styles for the two reference types I cite, journal articles and book chapters. But maybe I will upload it anyway one I'm finished with my paper and worked out all the quirks.

Bruce said...

You don't necessarily need to write specific stuff for a bunch of types. Just try to use macros and design them so that they have reasonable fallback behavior (that they work even without specific type definitions).