Proposed change to CSL input XML

Sebastian seems to have a solid grasp on the issues. I also often share his frustration with legal citations. Just so that everyone in the conversation knows what the deal is about legal citations, I have included some background.

Legal decisions are published in serial publications called “reporters”. In the U.S. there are two main commercial reporters - LexisNexis and Westlaw - and a smattering of government reporters for various courts. The commercial reporters are objectively better. They are comprehensive, and they are heavily annotated; everyone I ever met in the profession uses either LexisNexis or Westlaw. However, reporters are expensive, and they consume a lot of space in an office, so law offices usually subscribe to either Lexis or Westlaw, but not both. Parallel citations were designed so that legal readers could benefit from reading a document, even if they had a different reporter than the one preferred by the writer. The practical importance of parallel citations is diminishing as the legal world moves into the digital environment, but parallel citations are still a requirement in many jurisdictions and journals.

What would my proposal look like in an actual CSL style? I am not an expert in CSL, but I’ll give it my best shot. The most important use case for a “serials” variable is for parallel citations. I will show how an existing CSL style could be modified to add support for parallel citations.

My example is taken from “bluebook.csl”. The excerpt below shows the styling instructions for creating the long form citation for legal opinions.

Bluebook.csl

  <else-if type="legal_case">
    <text variable="title" suffix=", " font-variant="normal"/>
    <text variable="number" suffix=", "/>
    <group delimiter=" ">
      <text variable="volume"/>
      <text variable="container-title"/>
      <text variable="page"/>
    </group>
    <text variable="locator" prefix=", "/>
    <group prefix=" (" suffix=")" delimiter=" ">
      <text variable="authority"/>
      <date variable="issued">
        <date-part name="month" form="short" suffix=" "/>
        <date-part name="day" suffix=", "/>
        <date-part name="year"/>
      </date>
    </group>
  </else-if>

My proposed modification would be to allow CSL styles to encapsulate essential information about a serial publication within a element. The block would have one or more children which contained the text variables.

Modified-Bluebook.csl

  <else-if type="legal_case">
    <text variable="title" suffix=", " font-variant="normal"/>
    <text variable="number" suffix=", "/>
    <serials variable="reporter">
       <serial delimiter=", " >
            <group delimiter=" ">
                <text variable="volume"/>
                <text variable="container-title"/>
                <text variable="page"/>
            </group>
          <text variable="locator" prefix=", "/>
       </serial>
    </serials>
    <group prefix=" (" suffix=")" delimiter=" ">
      <text variable="authority"/>
      <date variable="issued">
        <date-part name="month" form="short" suffix=" "/>
        <date-part name="day" suffix=", "/>
        <date-part name="year"/>
      </date>
    </group>
  </else-if>

There are two things that I want to point out about the modified-bluebook.csl. One, parallel citations are separated by commas, so the element has a delimiter attribute.

Two, the “locator” text variable has to be inside the element - which is something I did not consider in my first post. Each parallel citation has to have its own “pincite” or “locator”.

A citation rendered with the modified-bluebook styling would appear as follows.

“Czapinski v. St. Francis Hosp., Inc., 2000 WI 80, 86, 236 Wis. 2d 316, 319, 613 N.W.2d 120, 122. (Wis. 2000)”

In closing:

I recognize that CSL should not adopt any changes that are not supported by the major stakeholders. However, I am very interested in your feedback on the technical merits of the proposal.

  • Tom O’Reilly

Whenever a case like this comes up, I try to generalize.

So the proposal is fine, except I wonder if there’s really need for a new
element to support this, and if it might be generalized.

Thinking out loud, this is basically a situation where there is more than
one “container”. Maybe one or more new attributes on cs:group?

After giving more thought to my proposed CSL element, I would like to modify the proposal. I would to rename the proposed element from to . Other changes will be listed in my answer to the questions that Bruce raises.

Bruce brings up 2 important concerns with my previous proposal:

QUESTIONS

  1. Is the proposal necessary?

  2. Could the solution be solved by extending the features of the element?

  3. Could the proposal be generalized beyond its niche applicability?

ANSWERS

(1) The proposal is necessary in my opinion.

Frank Bennett has done a lot of incredible work with citeproc-js and Multi-lingual Zotero. In addition to maintaining the processor, he added experimental support for parallel citations for legal users. However, the lengths that he has had to go to achieve that support demonstrate why the construct should be adopted.

“In CSL-M, parallel citations are produced when the item types of two adjacent citations match, the items are of a legal type, and their titles and dates also match.” (Bennett, F. “Citations out of the Box”, p. 78).

This approach introduces several problems. First, storing information about the same item in two different citations allows the possibility of storing inconsistent information. Second, it relies upon the processor to imply a relationship between two citations, instead of relying upon an explicit data structure. This means that CSL Processors need to have complicated code in order to support parallel citations - which limits adoption of the feature. Third - from my understanding - the style creators don’t have the ability give instructions about how parallel citations should be styled.

In contrast, supporting a element will ensure data integrity, it is easier for processors to implement, and it gives style creators the flexibility to target users of parallel citations, if they choose.

(2) Extending the element to support the proposed features would NOT be an advisable solution.

Just like the proposed element, the element is primarily used for item data that is logically related. However, it’s primary function is that it “implicitly acts as a conditional.” (http://docs.citationstyles.org/en/stable/specification.html#group). elements are not rendered if it contains a variable, and the variables are empty. When a element is rendered, it can apply prefix before the content, apply a suffix after the content, and apply delimiters in between its variables.

The element has a clearly defined, useful role in styling data. However, there are several features that the element lacks compared to the proposed element.
First, the element does not have a variable name. The element acts as a collection of variables, but it is not a variable itself.
Second, because the element does not correspond to a variable, it also does not support iterating through complex data. The element and element are examples of elements that supported complex data - data that is represented in a nested structure. A element will iterate through every name that is associated with that variable. The proposed element is functionally closer to the element than to the element. In fact, the element is fairly be described as a more flexible element. Just you would not want to extend the element to directly render names, I think that it would be just as unwise to use to directly render information that a element should render.

(3) The proposal could be generalized beyond supporting only parallel citations for legal users.

I think that the element should be named a element, instead of being named . The allowed sub-elements of would be elements. This would indicate to style designers that the element is to be used as a “container” for any pieces of information that are logically related and that are repeatable.

Each element would be composed of elements. The elements are directly analogous to elements of a CSL style. elements should follow the variable-naming conventions for Standard Variables from Appendix IV of the CSL specification. (http://docs.citationstyles.org/en/stable/specification.html#standard-variables).

EXAMPLE REPRESENTATION

<container>

    <container-part name="text-variable-name" />

    .....

</container>

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

  1. THE PROPOSAL IS PARTIALLY BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE

If adopted, new CSL styles would be able to process old data. I have already written a patch for citeproc-js that would support elements in a CSL style sheet. (81 lines of pretty simple code). My implementation first looks for item data under the variable-name of the element. If that variable-name is not found, the processor then looks for item data using the variable names of the elements. This means that styles that use elements can still fully process item data, even if that data was not encoded to explicitly support elements.

  1. THE PROPOSAL IS NOT FULLY BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE, AND IS NOT COMPATIBLE BETWEEN STYLES. THE POSSIBLE VARIABLE NAMES FOR ELEMENTS SHOULD BE SPECIFIED

Old style sheets would not be able to process new data that would target the features of CSL - unless the possible variable names for elements are constrained. Constraining the variable names would also required for compatibility between new CSL styles.

It is hard to work out which variable names should be allowed for elements, without anticipating every use case. If I could speculate about a possible solution. . . Drawing inspiration from Bibframe’s model (https://www.loc.gov/bibframe/docs/bibframe2-model.html), perhaps the variable name for elements should be limited to names such “Instances”, “Events”, and “Subjects”.

Send xbiblio-devel mailing list submissions to
xbiblio-devel@lists.sourceforge.net

To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xbiblio-devel
xbiblio-devel Info Page - SourceForgehttps://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xbiblio-devel
lists.sourceforge.net
This list is for development discussion around the xbiblio project, including schema design for the citation style language (CSL) and implementation discussion.

or, via email, send a message with subject or body ‘help’ to
xbiblio-devel-request@lists.sourceforge.net

You can reach the person managing the list at
xbiblio-devel-owner@lists.sourceforge.net

When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
than “Re: Contents of xbiblio-devel digest…”

Today’s Topics:

  1. Re: Proposed change to CSL input XML (Bruce D’Arcus)
  2. citeproc-java 1.0.0 has just been released! (Michel Kr?mer)
  3. Incorrectly changed title case (Joseph Reagle)
  4. Re: Incorrectly changed title case (Sebastian Karcher)

Hi Tom,

So, to briefly condense your posts on this topic (for myself and others):
Juris-M (formerly Multilingual Zotero, MLZ) extends the official CSL
specification in a number of ways to improve support for legal citations.
One of these extensions is the support for parallel citations, where a
single document is published redundantly in multiple outlets. Juris-M
assumes that each so-called report is stored as a separate item, and
automatically collapses reports to the same document if they are cited
directly next to each other. See pages 6 and 78 of
http://citationstylist.org/public/mlzbook.pdf for more context and examples.

Your proposal is to store these separate reports as a single item, and to
make it possible in CSL to properly render the information from the various
reporters of each item (each report will have its own values for fields
like “container-title”, “volume”, “section”, etc.).

After reading your proposal, I have a few questions:

  • assuming that we store all the publication information from the various
    publishers/reporters in a single item, in some form of ordered array, what
    are the exact formatting requirements for parallel citations? For example,
    for an item with multiple reports, is it ever necessary to be able to:
    • cite a subset of the reports?
    • control the order of the reports?
  • for the old-timers here: does anybody know if there are any good
    discussions here or on the Zotero forums about hierarchical item types? Do
    we have an overview of the various cases where hierarchical item types
    would help? E.g. https://www.zotero.org/support/requested_features only
    mentions “chapters as sub-items of an edited volume”. I’m wondering if
    there is a lot of functional overlap between hierarchical item types and
    parallel legal citations.

Rintze

P.S. Tom, it looks like every time you respond you start a new thread in
this mailing list, which makes this discussion harder to follow (this
discussion is a continuation of
http://xbiblio-devel.2463403.n2.nabble.com/Proposed-change-to-CSL-input-XML-specification-tp7579492.html
and
http://xbiblio-devel.2463403.n2.nabble.com/Proposed-change-to-CSL-input-XML-tp7579502.html).
Could you try to reply directly next time? You should be able to do this by
replying to the thread via http://xbiblio-devel.2463403.n2.nabble.com/, or
by subscribing to the mailing list at
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xbiblio-devel, after which you
should receive future mailing list emails in your inbox.

The major citation use case for hierarchical items I can think of are things like Annual Reviews’ style, where multiple chapters from one book are cited as “Chapter, see Book” with the full book cited separately.