Importing .csl style into bookends

[mzumaeta]

Good evening! I know that there are many style options available in Bookends, but the School where I am doing my PhD has its own specific style of citation. A version of the school's style of citation has been develop in zotero as a .csl file. I would like to import this style into bookends. How would I go about to do that? I could use zotero, but why would I do that if I own bookends? I would hate to have to develop this specific style set from scratch when there is already something developed in zotero. Any help will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!
Moises

[Jon]

Bookends formats and CSL styles are very different, you can't import the later. Creating a style in Bookends is pretty easy, though (far easier than for CSL). It will probably take you less than 10 minutes to do it (and I can provide advice if you run into problems). Have you seen our video tutorial on formatting (which is much more fleshed out in the user guide)?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CowJRIu ... load_owner

Jon
Sonny Software

[vinschger]

I absolutely understand that CSL and Bookends formats are different. But I assume each field in a bookends format can be associated to a field in a CSL format, e.g. author field to author field, years field to years field, journal name to journal name? Couldn't therefore a CSL format import be a possibility? The CSL repository is huge. For me bookends is the best reference manager of all (I was a papers user, I tried mendeley, zotero and also paperpile and endnote). but the csl repository indeed is an advantage in comparison to have to create ir adjust new styles each time when I submit to a new journal (even if its easy). what do other user think? or do you think this isn't needed at all?

[iandol]

Having made my own CSL and Bookends styles, I much prefer Bookends format manager! The CSL editors I tried are less intuitive, and the CSL XML spec, while comprehensive, takes more time to understand.

Writing a converter is a non-trivial task, each system represents the underlying data in different ways and it isn't a simple matter to handle all the edge cases of how behaviour may change (the way title case is handled etc.)

I don't see an immediate justification for Jon to write such a system in the short term to be honest. I suppose in the long-term, considering that Bookends for iOS also uses CSL, and that CSL is supported by many other tools and with more people writing styles for it, there could be an argument to either write a converter, or to switch Bookends over to use CSL completely (this is an even bigger undertaking as all the bibliography system would need to be rebuilt[1]).

- - - -
[1] Jon wouldn't need to do this from scratch, he could take advantage of the existing CSL formatting engines that can generate the final output and already consist of plugins for Word etc.) BUT that is still a lot of refactoring and differences in what CSL supports vs. Bookends scanning would mean this would not be backwards compatible at all...

[vinschger]

Maybe there would also be another option:
(I love bookends, and I would like to use it as my primary reference managing program in the future... but having the possiblity to use CSL styles when publishing in different journals is very useful).
would such a workflow be possible:
1. inserting references in word with bookends
2. formatting the document with CSL-styles using another (free) software, e.g. mendeley or zotero (based on bookends references and CSL styles)
would this be possible? without any geeky workarounds that are too complicate for a non-coding-normal-MAC-user?

[Jon]

There is no magic. You can export your Bookends library as EndNote XML and import that into Zotero. Then use Zotero for citing and scanning.

Jon
Sonny Software