form="abbreviated"?

Do we need to add an “abbreviated” value option for the form attribute?

This seems like an easy solution to the use case that Julian notes here:

http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/1561/harvard-style-testing/#Item_32

Or is this too easy and I’m missing something?

Bruce

I think so… let me quote from the course manual…

In Level 2 OU courses you will often be referring to your course materials,
including the course texts, so handy abbreviations have been provided for
these materials.
Here are the abbreviations for A251:
Block 1, Block 2, etc.
CD1
HP

Here are examples of using these abbreviations in your text references:
(Block 1, p.18)
(HP, pp.54–55)
(CD1, Track 4)
Set readings from journal articles should be referred to in the same way as
material from outside the course.

Referencing material from outside the course

If you use ‘outside’ material for your essays, you need to use a slightly
more detailed format. A251 requires the use of what is called the ‘Harvard
system’. You give the reference in brackets at the end of the sentence it
refers to. The reference consists of the author’s last name, followed by the
date of publication and the page number. Here is an example:
‘The Aztecs tended to be extremely cruel in dealing with uprisings on the
fringes of their empire’ (Bloggs, 1972, p.81).

In the bibliography (this is the HP one above) it still appears as:
Scarre, C. (ed.) (2005) The Human Past, London, Thames and Hudson.

So in this course, in need to cite it as (HP) or (HP, p.34).
However if it were not the course book, it would be
(Scarre, 2005, p. 34).

Its kind of them to make it “handy” but a pain to have to implement it. I
loose marks for not using the correct citation, and as the citations are
included in the word count, I loose words too - maybe 20 citations in a 500
word essay builds up a little!
Also - the Harvard style they define bares only passing resemblance to
either of the two Harvard styles I implemented!

So what I would like is some key that I could say

… do the fixed variant


usual rules

This is probably a weird case, its just the one I need right now!

Julian.

Its kind of them to make it “handy” but a pain to have to implement it. I
loose marks for not using the correct citation, and as the citations are
included in the word count, I loose words too - maybe 20 citations in a 500
word essay builds up a little!

Sheesh, you need to tell your professor to get a life!

OK, don’t do that (you might lose a lot of points!), but these kinds
of rules are silly.

Bruce

Seconded. Citations should never be included in the word count, since
that encourages ‘skipping’ citations (aka plagarism) and thus
undermines the linking fabric of scientific life. Tell your professor
that from me :slight_smile: We finally got this changed for one of the big
international conferences I go to (the switch to no printed
proceedings helps too, of course).

(OTOH, sometimes it is handy to have such labels particular for
talking about seminal works, eg it’s very common when talking about
Marx’s books.)

–J

Any other thoughts on this?

I already added a few terms, BTW.