Category Archives: Tips and Tricks

I’m working on putting together a presentation (or at least a blog post) detailing all of my “expert” Zotero knowledge. I’ve spent a lot of time in the past few weeks figuring out how to really use it to my advantage. Before I finish that, I thought I’d at least share my changes to the Vancouver style.

I’ve got two versions:

1. I don’t know what the official correct style is, but I prefer to use square brackets as the prefix and suffix for citations with commas as the delimiters. The Vancouver style that comes standard with Zotero uses parentheses and semicolons. Also, the standard Vancouver style gets formatted in Word using a table, which is highly annoying. I removed the “second field align” criteria to avoid this.

   I’ve uploaded the file, and you can download it here:
   vancouver.csl

   Once you’ve downloaded the file, navigate to the directory and drag-and-drop the file into Firefox. This will overwrite the standard Vancouver style. If you want to keep both versions, open up the file in a text editor and change “” to “” (or anything else).

2. For some papers, including those we submit to AMIA every year, the citations are formatted as superscript text. I amended the Vancouver style above to follow this format instead of the square bracket prefix and suffix.

   I’ve uploaded this file as well, and you can download it here:
   vancouver_superscript.csl

   Follow the instructions above to install the style, however I have already changed the title to avoid overwriting the original Vancouver style (because I keep both installed).

Editing styles isn’t extremely difficult, but it’s not completely intuitive, especially if you’re not familiar with XML. I came across the following link that might also be helpful if you want to create a new style:
http://www.somwhere.org/csl/

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