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Style Requirements

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Rintze M. Zelle edited this page Nov 30, 2013 · 37 revisions

We have several rules in place for naming and formatting CSL styles. When making submissions to the style repository, please follow the guidelines below to help us keep the repository tidy.

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

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

  2. File names of styles must consist solely of lowercase roman letters (a-z), digits (0-9), single hyphens to separate words (-), and end in a ".csl" extension. File names should be written out in full, 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 released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License (set with the <rights/> element). Use <rights license="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/"> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License</rights> ("This" should follow directly after the preceding ">" and be on the same line).

  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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