# 235 new styles

**URL:** <https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/235-new-styles/1109>\
**Category:** CSL Development\
**Created:** [June 29, 2012, 10:34pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/235-new-styles/1109 "2012-06-29T22:34:05Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 19\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Charles\_Parnot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/57b2e6/32.png) [@Charles\_Parnot](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Charles_Parnot)\
**Post date:** [June 29, 2012, 10:34pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/235-new-styles/1109/1 "2012-06-29T22:34:05Z")

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I know it’s a little scary, but I jsut added 235 styles, see commit:

> <https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/commit/36eb37bb43c22879613f1312d8041dac42d72607>

I documented the process here: [https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/issues/190](https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/issues/190)

(not sure it’s the best way to document it, but as long as it’s documented, I figured it’s better than nothing!).

Only issue is I don’t have a good way to systematically validate the style, as I typically use the web interface. If one of you is able to check all the dependent styles added, that would be great. Please let me know if you spot some issues, as I will then modify my script accordindly to take into account the missing bits. For instance, I escape the ‘&’ in the titles, but maybe I missed some other character. Or something is systematically wrong with the generation of the identifier or file name.

let me know!

Charles–  
Charles Parnot  
@Charles_Parnot  
twitter: @cparnot

> **[Home - Papers](https://www.papersapp.com/)**
>
> ReadCube Papers is your award winning reference manager that will improve the way you find, access, organize, read, cite and share scholarly research.

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**Author:** ![Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/4bbf92/32.png) [@Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Bruce_D_Arcus1)\
**Post date:** [June 29, 2012, 11:19pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/235-new-styles/1109/2 "2012-06-29T23:19:10Z")

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Awesome!

On this …

> Only issue is I don’t have a good way to systematically validate the style, as I typically use the web interface.

Time to install a local validator, and write a trivial batch script!

If you’re using brew on your Mac, just do 'brew install rnv` to get  
going. Or compile it yourself.

[http://www.davidashen.net/rnv.html](http://www.davidashen.net/rnv.html)

MUCH faster and more flexible than a web service.

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**Author:** ![Charles\_Parnot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/57b2e6/32.png) [@Charles\_Parnot](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Charles_Parnot)\
**Post date:** [June 30, 2012, 10:50pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/235-new-styles/1109/3 "2012-06-30T22:50:41Z")

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Go figure: writing a script to create those styles sounded like fun, but somehow installing a validator makes me want to run away 😉

I’ll have to bite the bullet at some point, though, I agree!

charles

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**Author:** ![Robert\_Knight](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/ba9def/32.png) [@Robert\_Knight](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Robert_Knight)\
**Post date:** [July 2, 2012, 9:36am UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/235-new-styles/1109/4 "2012-07-02T09:36:53Z")

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Hi Charles,

Thanks for your work on this. I do wonder whether it makes sense to  
have quite so many dependent styles in the repository though.  
I have been wondering if it would make sense to ‘push’ users and  
publications to use well known existing styles more.

> I’ll have to bite the bullet at some point, though, I agree!

Less painful that dealing with problems arising if your users download  
styles with bugs that would be caught by a validator though.

Regards,  
Rob.

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**Author:** ![Sebastian\_Karcher](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.citationstyles.org/sebastian_karcher/32/176_2.png) [@Sebastian\_Karcher](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Sebastian_Karcher)\
**Post date:** [July 2, 2012, 1:46pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/235-new-styles/1109/5 "2012-07-02T13:46:58Z")

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> Hi Charles,
> 
> Thanks for your work on this. I do wonder whether it makes sense to  
> have quite so many dependent styles in the repository though.  
> I have been wondering if it would make sense to ‘push’ users and  
> publications to use well known existing styles more.  
> I don’t think pushing users is an options - if you submit an article  
> to a given journal, you need to make sure to follow that journal’s  
> citation style. Dependent styles help users identify these styles -  
> you can’t really expect a user to know that a given style is, say  
> “Elsevier’s Harvard with Titles”.  
> There is also the fact that Endnote’s 5000 or so styles are still  
> being held up as proof that they provide users with oh so many options

- dependent styles (which I assume Endnote uses in some way, too) help  
us compete with that.  
Finally, I don’t see a downside - on Zotero’s repository you can  
remove dependent styles with one click, it’d be easy for you to  
implement the same at Mendeley.

As for pushing publishers - sure, that’d be great. There are way too  
many different citation styles. But that didn’t even work when there  
weren’t good options to automate that, so I don’t really see how we  
(or anyone else) is going to convince publishers now.

> > I’ll have to bite the bullet at some point, though, I agree!
> 
> Less painful that dealing with problems arising if your users download  
> styles with bugs that would be caught by a validator though.  
> while I agree that styles should be validated before being committed  
> (maybe use a pull request if you can’t validate?), there are a lot of  
> people watching the repository - we’d spot invalid styles within hours  
> and fix it. Also, again, I don’t know how you handle that at Mendeley,  
> but on the Zotero repo invalid styles are marked as such - you could  
> easily do the same.

Best,  
Sebastian\>

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**Author:** ![Sylvester\_Keil](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/85e7bf/32.png) [@Sylvester\_Keil](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Sylvester_Keil)\
**Post date:** [July 2, 2012, 2:11pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/235-new-styles/1109/6 "2012-07-02T14:11:24Z")

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Just a heads-up that Rintze and I started looking into automating tests (validation is among them I believe) using travis-ci – once we have this set-up we can be notified whenever a style is submitted or changed that does not validate.

Best,  
Sylvester

[signature.asc](https://canada1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/uploads/citationstyles/original/1X/80f6adaf263eecb02764de52a9ccc07d8ec7e2c3.asc) (203 Bytes)

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**Author:** ![Simon\_Kornblith](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ce7236/32.png) [@Simon\_Kornblith](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Simon_Kornblith)\
**Post date:** [July 2, 2012, 3:26pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/235-new-styles/1109/7 "2012-07-02T15:26:32Z")

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Unfortunately, to contradict this,

curl -s [http://zotero.org/styles](http://zotero.org/styles) | grep -B 6 -A 3 invalidSchema

shows that the BioMed Central style is invalid and has been since June 30. The validation error is not severe (“medicinede” is an invalid category term) but it should still get fixed.

FWIW, like others here, I think that committing styles that haven’t been validated is a very bad idea. Installing a local validator is not very difficult.

Simon

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**Author:** ![Charles\_Parnot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/57b2e6/32.png) [@Charles\_Parnot](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Charles_Parnot)\
**Post date:** [July 2, 2012, 3:50pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/235-new-styles/1109/8 "2012-07-02T15:50:29Z")

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Just to clarify things: I do validate the styles I submit (except those 235 styles, which is why I mentioned I had not, and requested help from this list). The BMC style was a copy of bmc-bioinformatics. I made the mistake of not validating it again. Sorry!

Now this is very interesting:

> curl -s [Zotero Style Repository](http://zotero.org/styles) | grep -B 6 -A 3 invalidSchema

Where does that come from?

charles–  
Sent with my thumbs.

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**Author:** ![Rintze\_Zelle](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.citationstyles.org/rintze_zelle/32/175_2.png) [@Rintze\_Zelle](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Rintze_Zelle)\
**Post date:** [July 2, 2012, 4:02pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/235-new-styles/1109/9 "2012-07-02T16:02:03Z")

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Somewhat related: it’s always a little time consuming for me to make sure  
pull requests from other contributors contain valid styles. It basically  
involves manually navigating to the raw CSL style files, and copy/pasting  
their individual URLs to [validator.nu](http://validator.nu). I just discovered that Travis CI,  
which is a hosted continuous integration service which Sylvester has some  
experience with using, now also seems to be able to test pull requests  
before they are merged! See  
[http://about.travis-ci.org/blog/announcing-pull-request-support/](http://about.travis-ci.org/blog/announcing-pull-request-support/) . Travis  
CI supports Java projects, so I have some hope we can use their service to  
run the Jing validator.

Rintze

P.S. I fixed the BioMed Central style just now.On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 11:26 AM, Simon Kornblith \<@Simon\_Kornblith\>wrote:

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Charles\_Parnot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/57b2e6/32.png) [@Charles\_Parnot](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Charles_Parnot)\
**Post date:** [July 2, 2012, 4:02pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/235-new-styles/1109/10 "2012-07-02T16:02:52Z")

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> Hi Charles,
> 
> Thanks for your work on this. I do wonder whether it makes sense to  
> have quite so many dependent styles in the repository though.  
> I have been wondering if it would make sense to ‘push’ users and  
> publications to use well known existing styles more.

BMC is a great example of that: I was impressed all their journals follow the same guidelines. Unfortunately, no other publisher has such a systematically consistent format for references.

As for the users: one Papers user asked for the style for Malaria Journal. Should I have told him to use ‘BMC informatics’. And tell the same to every user that ask? I don’t think we should put the burden of figuring out which style to use I the user. Their goal is to write a paper, not to spend time figuring out why a colon is used, instead of a period in the references. In fact, nobody should care about this, but publishers do, unfortunately, for some weird reasons. So it’s not just a number battle with EndNote, it’s a usability issue. It really makes the user’s life better if the style for the journal they want is right there. I think.

Charles

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**Author:** ![Sebastian\_Karcher](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.citationstyles.org/sebastian_karcher/32/176_2.png) [@Sebastian\_Karcher](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Sebastian_Karcher)\
**Post date:** [July 2, 2012, 4:10pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/235-new-styles/1109/11 "2012-07-02T16:10:47Z")

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> As for the users: one Papers user asked for the style for Malaria Journal. Should I have told him to use ‘BMC informatics’. And tell the same to every user that ask? I don’t think we should put the burden of figuring out which style to use I the user.

Absolutely - that’s what I meant by "Dependent styles help users  
identify these styles -  
you can’t really expect a user to know that a given style is, say  
“Elsevier’s Harvard with Titles”. The Endnote numbers battle is a  
secondary (albeit IMHO not irrelevant) concern.

S.------  
Sebastian Karcher  
Ph.D. Candidate  
Department of Political Science  
Northwestern University

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**Author:** ![Rintze\_Zelle](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.citationstyles.org/rintze_zelle/32/175_2.png) [@Rintze\_Zelle](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Rintze_Zelle)\
**Post date:** [July 2, 2012, 4:20pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/235-new-styles/1109/12 "2012-07-02T16:20:26Z")

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I think per-journal styles make a lot of sense from a user-point-of-view.  
It might make sense to automatically append the parent style to the style  
title to indicate the dependency, e.g. “Malaria Journal (BioMed Central)”,  
but some CSL style titles are quite long as they are.

And yeah, a lot of sites that compare the different bibliographic reference  
managers list the number of styles supported, so propping up the number  
with dependent styles clearly helps with marketing CSL.

One thing where I think [http://www.zotero.org/styles](http://www.zotero.org/styles) could do better is  
highlighting a few high-quality styles, such as apa.csl . E.g. the old  
repository had a separate section for “default styles” that shipped with  
Zotero, which was handy when you weren’t looking for a journal-specific  
style.

RintzeOn Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 12:02 PM, Charles Parnot \<@Charles\_Parnot\>wrote:

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**Author:** ![Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/4bbf92/32.png) [@Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Bruce_D_Arcus1)\
**Post date:** [July 2, 2012, 4:45pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/235-new-styles/1109/13 "2012-07-02T16:45:09Z")

</div>

Dependent styles are just XML-encoded aliases, with some additional  
metadata. So yeah, I don’t think we should worry about having too many  
of them. If anything, we should encourage more (e.g. rather than a  
journal create their own new one, just link to an existing one).

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Charles\_Parnot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/57b2e6/32.png) [@Charles\_Parnot](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Charles_Parnot)\
**Post date:** [July 2, 2012, 4:58pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/235-new-styles/1109/14 "2012-07-02T16:58:09Z")

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> The Endnote numbers battle is a secondary (albeit IMHO not irrelevant) concern.

Definitely important too 😉

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**Author:** ![Dan\_Stillman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ecb155/32.png) [@Dan\_Stillman](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Dan_Stillman)\
**Post date:** [July 2, 2012, 6:38pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/235-new-styles/1109/15 "2012-07-02T18:38:25Z")

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I’m happy to add something like that back, if someone can provide  
phrasing and a list. In order to not complicate the UI too much, it  
could just be another checkbox above/below “Show only unique styles”.

“Show most popular styles”? “Show most common styles”? “Show top styles”?

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Rintze\_Zelle](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.citationstyles.org/rintze_zelle/32/175_2.png) [@Rintze\_Zelle](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Rintze_Zelle)\
**Post date:** [July 2, 2012, 8:05pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/235-new-styles/1109/16 "2012-07-02T20:05:14Z")

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We don’t know which styles are most popular, so my vote would be for “top”.  
Would a drop-down menu make more sense, since the options should probably  
be mutually exclusive? Maybe “Show all styles” (default), “Show unique  
styles only”, “Show top styles only”? Do you prefer a static list, or  
should I add a JSON list in the styles repo with the style IDs of the top  
styles?

Also, Dan, how do you feel about adding some interface elements to select  
styles by locale?

Rintze

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Dan\_Stillman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ecb155/32.png) [@Dan\_Stillman](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Dan_Stillman)\
**Post date:** [July 2, 2012, 8:30pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/235-new-styles/1109/17 "2012-07-02T20:30:10Z")

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> ```
> > One thing where I think http://www.zotero.org/styles could do better
> > is highlighting a few high-quality styles, such as apa.csl .
> E.g. the
> > old repository had a separate section for "default styles" that
> > shipped with Zotero, which was handy when you weren't looking for a
> > journal-specific style.
> 
> I'm happy to add something like that back, if someone can provide
> phrasing and a list. In order to not complicate the UI too much, it
> could just be another checkbox above/below "Show only unique styles".
> 
> "Show most popular styles"? "Show most common styles"? "Show top
> styles"?
> 
> ```
> 
> We don’t know which styles are most popular, so my vote would be for  
> “top”. Would a drop-down menu make more sense, since the options  
> should probably be mutually exclusive?

A drop-down or a radio group. The former would save more space, while  
the latter would show all options. It’s fairly important that people see  
that they can show only unique styles.

> Maybe “Show all styles” (default), “Show unique styles only”, “Show  
> top styles only”? Do you prefer a static list, or should I add a JSON  
> list in the styles repo with the style IDs of the top styles?

Let’s just go with a static list for now.

> Also, Dan, how do you feel about adding some interface elements to  
> select styles by locale?

I’m fine with that. Does the recommendation on  
[Repository - add filter for default-locales - Zotero Forums](http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/21148/) still hold?

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Rintze\_Zelle](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.citationstyles.org/rintze_zelle/32/175_2.png) [@Rintze\_Zelle](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Rintze_Zelle)\
**Post date:** [July 2, 2012, 8:47pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/235-new-styles/1109/18 "2012-07-02T20:47:52Z")

</div>

> A drop-down or a radio group. The former would save more space, while the  
> latter would show all options. It’s fairly important that people see that  
> they can show only unique styles.

Yes, a radio button group would probably be better.

> how do you feel about adding some interface elements to select styles  
> by locale?
> 
> I’m fine with that. Does the recommendation on  
> [Repository - add filter for default-locales - Zotero Forums](http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/21148/) still hold?

I added  
[locales/locales.json at master · citation-style-language/locales · GitHub](https://github.com/citation-style-language/locales/blob/master/locales.json) ,  
which contains a translation table between locale codes and human-readable  
language names, so it would be possible to create a dropdown menu for the  
style language with options “All languages”, “Afrikaans”, “Arabic”, etc.  
You could populate the list based on the default-locale values of the  
styles in the repository. There is also the distinction between styles with  
and without a set default-locale (with only the latter localizing to the  
client-provided locale), and we might want to label those latter styles as  
“International”. If that’s all too difficult Sebastian’s three-way “no  
default language”/“English”/“non-English” division would work as well.

Rintze

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Charles\_Parnot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/57b2e6/32.png) [@Charles\_Parnot](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Charles_Parnot)\
**Post date:** [July 6, 2012, 2:47am UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/235-new-styles/1109/19 "2012-07-06T02:47:10Z")

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OK, I ended up using Jing, because it did not require any installation, and looks like it works well for that purpose.

Thanks!

charles