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Style Requirements

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rmzelle edited this page Sep 10, 2012 · 37 revisions

Style Requirements

Styles that are submitted to the style repository must conform to the following requirements:

  1. The file name of the style must consist solely of lowercase roman letters (a-z), digits (0-9), single hyphens to separate words (-), and a ".csl" extension. In most cases the name should be written out in full, e.g. "journal-of-results.csl" instead of "jor.csl".
  2. 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/apa" for apa.csl).
  3. The style self-link (set with <link href="..." rel="self"/>) , which indicates where the style can be found online, must correspond to the style ID (e.g., <link href="http://www.zotero.org/styles/apa" rel="self"/>).
  4. 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>.
  5. If your style is largely derived from an existing style, delete the original listing of authors and contributors listed, 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"/>
  6. 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 available locales, see https://github.com/citation-style-language/locales/wiki).
  7. If the style is for a journal, include the ISSN number(s) in the info section as <issn>1234-5678</issn>, and the electronic ISSN as <eissn>1234-5678</eissn>.
  8. To facilitate future updates of the style, include a link to a style guide (or "instructions for authors") in the info section whenever possible, marked as documentation, e.g. <link href="http://www.styleguide.edu" rel="documentation"/>
  9. 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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