Proposal: Retire duplicate "Harvard" styles harvard1.csl & harvard7de.csl

CSL Development
1

Following up from a discussion at
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/42317/duplicate-harvard-styles/, I’d
like to propose removing two duplicate “Harvard” styles
from the github and Zotero CSL style file repositories:

harvard1.csl is a almost-duplicate of harvard-anglia-ruskin-university.csl;
both are based on http://libweb.anglia.ac.uk/referencing/harvard.htm,
http://libweb.anglia.ac.uk/referencing/harvard.htm

harvard7de.csl (German) is a almost-duplicate of
harvard-institut-fur-praxisforschung-de.csl; both are based on


resp.
http://www.institut-praxisforschung.ch/Portals/0/Jonas/Harvard-Zitierweise.pdf
(the second link is dead, redirecting to
http://www.institut-praxisforschung.com/,
http://www.institut-praxisforschung.com/ so this is/was clearly the same
guide).

My proposal is to keep only those with the more specific style names -
harvard-anglia-ruskin-university.csl and
harvard-institut-fur-praxisforschung-de.csl - and to remove harvard1.csl
and harvard7de.csl entirely.

Huge bonus: Getting rid of styles with overly generic names such as
harvard1.csl and harvard7de.csl would reinforce the important message that
there is no such thing as a single, official Harvard style, removing a very
common source of confusion among students and, sadly enough, librarians and
certain brands of commercial library and referencing software, too. See
also
http://docs.citationstyles.org/en/stable/primer.html#author-date-author-styles:
“Note that many style guides use the confusing term “Harvard” to refer to
author-date formats, even though most of these styles have no connection
to Harvard University. There is also no such thing as a single official
“Harvard” style.”

Any platforms where harvard1 seems popular would have to inform their users
that they should switch to harvard-anglia-ruskin-university.csl (or some
other author-date style) instead.

Are there any objections?

2

To follow up on this–as I told Nick in the Zotero thread, our biggest
concern here is Mendeley and any other product that uses Harvard1 as one of
the default styles. We’d obviously include a redirect in the
renamed-styles.json, but the formatting of the style would change for
users. So we’d particularly want to hear from the reference managers here.

From a purely CSL perspective, we’d definitely want to go ahead and remove
those styles.

3

Hi,

I had a quick look: harvard1.csl is the second most used style by
Mendeley users (data from 1 or 2 years but I don’t expect this to
change much).

Very sadly at Mendeley we are not using the renamed-styles.json for
what I remember. I’ll open a ticket but I’m not sure when this could
be done.
Having harvard1.csl a dependent style from
harvard-anglia-ruskin-university.csl would be a good user experience
for us - but not much correct for the CSL project.