Many journals require journal titles to be abbreviated according to one of several lists of journal abbreviations, such as the Index Medicus. Sometimes the journal requires the abbreviations to include periods after each part (as in J. Cell. Biol.), other styles require abbreviations without periods (J Cell Biol). Zotero has currently no support for these options. The only way to include journal abbreviations is to have the exact content of the “Journal Abbr” field displayed instead of the full journal title. In CSL this is achieved by using:

 <text variable="container-title" form="short"/> 

In the forthcoming CSL 1.0 it will be possible to strip away the periods in journal abbreviations as part of a style. Because of this it is recommended to store journal abbreviations with periods. In the longterm, Zotero developers plan functionality similar to BibTeX, which allows the import and use of several abbreviation lists.