Add Author-Date Elsevier Styles, including "Speech Communication;" consider renaming "Elsevier" styles to something more specific.

[ahoward]

Current Elsevier styles cannot represent all styles used by Elsevier journals. The author date style used by "Speech Communication" should have a comma following the year of publication and page numbers should be preceded by "pp.".

​http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/505597/authorinstructions
​http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2008.02.004

[dstillman]

Andrew: Where's the example citation on that page, and what's an example of what Zotero is doing now and what it should be doing? (By the way, .csl files, which I think is what you mean by ".cls files", are the styles Zotero uses itself, so that doesn't have anything to do with the original style guidelines.)

[karnesky]

Elsevier uses a few different styles. The style that you link to is an author-date style & most that have "Elsevier" in their name are numeric styles. At least within the author information, there is some variation in the styles used by different journals beyond this.

I am reluctant to make a blanket change to all Elsevier styles without further documentation.

It is worth addressing this particular journal's style. As we create more independent styles that reflect the differences across the multiple Elsevier journal names, we should perhaps rename the styles accordingly. Having a separate (often dependent) style for every journal seems like a good long-term goal (the only downside being "browse-ability").

[rmzelle]

I am reluctant to make a blanket change to all Elsevier styles without further documentation.

The style guide used for the elsevier-with-titles.csl (from the journal Cell Calcium*) doesn't use a pages label (e.g. 'pp.'), while the year is located in a whole other area of the citation and hasn't a suffix comma. So the reported issues don't seem to apply to the current Elsevier styles.

• ​http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/623014/authorinstructions#Refs

[karnesky]

I've amended the description, per Rintze's comments.

The remark that "It all seems to be locked up in .cls files" may actually refer to the BibTeX style "elsart-harv.bst" that Elsevier produces (in addition to the three numeric styles they have). LaTeX uses '.cls' files to format the article; Elsevier maintains and distributes the '.cls' and '.bst' files that have their name. N.B.: These small number of styles don't actually conform to the varied styles called for by Elsevier publications--Editors will often re-format citations supplied in these "common" formats to match what they actually want for their publication.

[ahoward]

I'm glad you all seem to have a handle on Elsevier styles generally. I've been asked to dig up as many new styles as I can (particularly dependent styles, as those are quite easy to implement). The Elsevier site lists 2400 different Journals, very few of which are already in Zotero. It does not make clear, however, how each journal's citation styles differ, if at all. This site ​http://jo.irisson.free.fr/bstdatabase/ has a great many BiBTeX styles, most of which are simply listed as dependents of a master Elsevier style, seemingly without variations. Of course, this guy could easily be wrong.

I'm more than willing to believe that you weren't able to open up the same page as me, Dan. I was looking at the Science Direct journal database through GMU's library site, which I'm not sure you have access to. I checked a number of articles from different journals addressing different topics and they consistently used the extra comma and "pp." Obviously, though, this contradicts the "Cell Calcium" page rmzelle linked to. If you go to [www.zotero.org/styles], the mouseover for the Elsevier style should give you an idea of what it's currently doing (the 4th listing, IIRC, is the journal example). Zotero's current behaviour actually matches the "Cell Calcium" page, but none of the examples I was able to pull up.

I'm not sure what to make of any of this. It would be very nice to be able to add these styles to Zotero (they would single-handedly bump us up to about the same number of styles as EndNote). I'm a little hesitant to just say we support them and then go about fixing them as people complain. Trevor seems to feel that's better than not supporting them, though, and he may well be right, as I'm not sure I know of a better way to figure out what variations each journal presents. But if you folks know of a way to figure this out, I am willing and able to put in the time to get them included, that being exactly the sort of thing interns are for.

As for the .cls vs .csl business, it's definitely .csl. This has some info about Elsevier's LaTeX styles: ​http://epsupport.elsevier.com/al/12/1/article.aspx?aid=1546&tab=faq&bt=4&r=0.2905742. I presume the formatting for citations is buried in there somewhere, but I don't have enough experience doing this sort of thing to figure out where.

[karnesky]

Andrew: It seems that you are using ScienceDirect's HTML copy as a reference, but it is best to refer to:

1. author information
2. PDFs from the free sample issue

which are both usually available in the www.elsevier.com domain & can be found via google or from the sciencedirect link for a particular journal.

(2) usually matches (1), but ScienceDirect's HTML copy uses a different reference style & should not be used unless neither of the above are available.

Sorry for compounding confusion regarding CSL & LaTeX/BibTeX. The bottom-line is that CSL isn't "locked up" & that there are multiple Elsevier BibTeX styles, which are yet another different style from any of the above. These can probably be ignored, as it is best to give journals what they explicitly ask for.

[ahoward]

Oops. When I said this:

"As for the .cls vs .csl business, it's definitely .csl."

I really meant:

"As for the .cls vs .csl business, it's definitely .cls."

So precisely the opposite. Sorry if that threw anyone off.

[karnesky]

(In [6259]) * Closes #1203

• Renamed biological-conservation.csl to elsevier-harvard.csl (which is common across many Elsevier styles).

• Replaced redundant elsevier-harvard-based styles with dependent styles.

• Added template information to misq and ecology-letters.

• Added forest ecology and management, acta tropica, and speech communication. There are plenty of other dependent styles that could be added, but these are what have been requested.