Citation styles not being respected?

Help
1

Hello,

I am looking for an easy way to preview and copy/paste a properly formatted reference (similarly to Zotero’s “Create Bibliography from Item” feature). If I understand correctly, the Preview tab in JabRef is the only way to accomplish this?

Here is my BibTeX source:

@Book{TravisHodgson2019,
  author    = {Travis, David and Hodgson, Philip},
  isbn      = {978-1-138-36529-2},
  publisher = {CRC Press},
  title     = {Think like a {UX} researcher},
  year      = {2019},
}

When I use F9 to cycle through styles in the Preview tab I notice that some styles are not applied correctly. I also notice a huge discrepancy between results coming from JabRef and Zotero. See examples below.

Here is the Preview result using APA (7th ed.) in JabRef:

Travis, David and Hodgson, Philip, 2019. Think like a UX researcher. CRC Press. ISBN 978-1-138-36529-2.

Here is the formatted result using APA (7th ed.) in Zotero:

Travis, D., & Hodgson, P. (2019). Think like a UX researcher . CRC Press.

Here is the Preview result using MLA in JabRef:

Travis, D., and P. Hodgson. Think like a UX researcher. CRC Press, 2019.

Here is the formatted result using MLA in Zotero:

Travis, David, and Philip Hodgson. Think like a UX Researcher . CRC Press, 2019.

According to MLA style guidelines, the word “researcher” should be capitalized. Why is this not working in JabRef?

My potential explanations:

  • I am doing something wrong
  • The two programs are using different style sheets
  • The programs are using different style sheet interpreters under the hood

Do you have any thoughts on this? Please let me know if more information or examples would be useful. Thank you.

2

Hi,

you are probably right with this:

  • The two programs are using different style sheets

More like different version. CSL styles in JabRef are updated automatically while we are developing, so the nightly/master branch always contains the latest resources.

  • The programs are using different style sheet interpreters under the hood

We recently changed the underlying implementation of the generator.
Regarding capitalization: I think the generator just doesn’t take capitalization into account for that style.
You might want to write a bug report here:

3

Thank you for your answer. I opened an issue on GitHub as you suggested. Here is the link in case anybody wants to follow it.