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Style Requirements

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Rintze M. Zelle edited this page Dec 2, 2013 · 37 revisions

When preparing submissions to the CSL style repository, please follow the formatting guidelines below:

  1. Avoid abbreviations in the style title. An acronym can be stored in the dedicated <title-short/> element instead. For example:

    <title>Journal of Results</title>  
<title-short>JOR</title-short>

  2. The file name of the style may contain no characters other than lowercase roman letters (a-z), digits (0-9), single hyphens to separate words (-), and must end in a ".csl" extension. Avoid abbreviations in the file name as well, e.g. "journal-of-results.csl", not "jor.csl". Drop diacritics such as umlauts (e.g., "für" becomes "fur", not "fuer").

  3. The style ID, set with the <id/> element, must be of the form "http://www.zotero.org/styles/file-name" (replace file-name with the actual file name without the ".csl" extension, e.g. "http://www.zotero.org/styles/journal-of-results" for journal-of-results.csl).

  4. The style self-link (set with <link href="..." rel="self"/>) , which indicates where the style can be found online, must match the style ID (e.g., <link href="http://www.zotero.org/styles/journal-of-results" rel="self"/>).

  5. The style must be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License. Use, on a single line:

    <rights license="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/">This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License</rights>

  6. If your style is derived from an existing style, delete the original listing of authors and contributors, and point to the original template style with a link in the style's info section, e.g. <link href="http://www.zotero.org/styles/original-style" rel="template"/>

  7. If your style only targets a single language (e.g. US English if you're submitting a style for an American journal), set the default-locale attribute on <style/> to the desired locale ("en-US" for US English; for the list of currently supported locales, see https://github.com/citation-style-language/locales/wiki). The language should also be mentioned in the style title, e.g. <title>Journal of Results (German)</title>, unless the language is English.

  8. If the style is for a journal, include the print and/or online ISSN number(s) in the info section as <issn>1234-5678</issn> and <eissn>1234-5678</eissn>.

  9. Include a documentation link to an online style guide (or "instructions for authors") in the info section whenever possible, e.g. <link href="http://www.styleguide.edu" rel="documentation"/>

  10. Make sure that your style validates against the CSL schema.

Finally, while not a strict requirement, we prefer XML that is indented with 2 spaces per level.

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