Hi all,
as promised, here’s the 2nd instalment of the conversation between Bruce,
Frank, Rintze, and me on CSL plans for 2016. This one focuses on the
general outline for updates of the CSL specifications&schema.
- Minor Update (terms, types, and variables)
There’s a fair number of proposed terms, variable&types that we should add
to CSL, most of them listed here
https://github.com/avram/zotero-bits/issues/ We’d also, in that process,
re-license the schema under MIT in line with our general governance
standards.
Any addition of these should be very straightforward for processors to
include and obviously the change would be backward compatible for old
styles. Our tentative goal for this would be within the next 3-4 months
Two things for people to comment/check on:
a) if you have something you’d like to see added that fits in this broad
description and isn’t listed at the link above, now would be a good time to
bring that up.
b) any thoughts from implementers on how you’d like us to deal with this
on the repository? I think it makes sense to have two branches for some
time, but we don’t really want to handle multiple branches for an extended
period of time.
- Major update (unclear timeline, maybe summer 2016?)
The main things we’d like to see would be
a) distinction between continuously paginated journals and those that are
not for APA and similar styles. This comes up a lot & is super annoying to
automate. We think that from the CSL side, we would just introduce a
variable like “continuously-paginated” which defaults to true (since most
journals are) and leave it to reference managers on how exactly to
implement, though we’d be happy to host metadata to help automatize this,
crowdsourced or otherwise.
b) Implementing a distinction between (author date) and author (date). This
is being requested a lot and the lack of proper support makes things hard
particularly for citation styles like APA with changing et al. requirements
depending on position of the cite. To assure that one of CSL’s key features
– one click conversion between author-date and footnotes styles, remains
in tact this means authors also need to be included in corresponding
citations for numeric and note styles, i.e. Smith (1776) needs to turn into
Smith [1] or Smith ^1 respectively. Pandoc-citeproc already does this, and
up to this point this could all be handled in the ref managers, processors.
Where we would need a CSL chance is to allow for different formatting
outside of the parentheses. E.g. APA (again!) has (Smith & Marx, 1776), but
Smith and Marx (1776), so we would need to allow for two formats in
cs:citation depending on the type of citation.
c) Composite styles as used in chemistry. These look like numeric styles,
but within a single numeric citation combine multiple references using a),
b), c) etc. This is the one we understand least well, so no one is really
sure how this would look properly implemented. If someone knows an expert
in ACS-type citation styles who’d be willing to walk us through exactly how
this works, that could be very helpful.
Are there any objections to any of these? And are there any major issues
we’re missing that we should put on the agenda for the next major update?
Thanks,
Sebastian–
Sebastian Karcher, PhD
www.sebastiankarcher.com