inconsistent citation style rendering

Created on 20 February 2024, over 1 year ago

My team considered using the bibcite module for a project, but our spot-check of a handful of citation style–reference type permutations showed too many inconsistencies when compared with canonical standards (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.).

We found that titles are not always italicized, dates are shown as year only without month or day, contributor role attributions (e.g. “Edited by...” or “Directed by...”) are missing, and citation elements are output in the wrong order. While we did not do a thorough review of issues reported for the module’s dependencies, many inconsistencies have been reported in this module's issue queue, including:

🐛 Editor books are rendered wrong Active
🐛 Normalization of date fields for CSL Active
#3302268: Incorrect page display in citation
#3117780: Provide correct title case transformation for titles in CSL
#3196421: Editors in wrong place
🐛 Publication Date should support more than "Year" (e.g., article in a newspaper APA format) Active
#3155552: Contributor, problem with punctuation in APA format
#3006180: Editors and other roles shown as authors

Citation formatting is a complex undertaking and the maintainers have done outstanding work integrating it all in this module. In the end, we decided that the inconsistencies would not meet the needs of our academic user base.

Are others using this module in an academic setting? If so, how are you mitigating the citation style inconsistencies?

🐛 Bug report
Status

Active

Version

3.0

Component

Code

Created by

🇺🇸United States daddison

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Comments & Activities

  • Issue created by @daddison
  • Hi @daddison
    It is too complex question in the fact. The first one you can do is update CSL. It can be too old and in not actual state.
    Also you can edit it to make render look as you want. We are not so good at this, so we prefer to use not modified csl files from CSL official repository.
    We don't update it to because we try to not change current sites behavior. In the fact we did it when updated citeproc library. But it was really needed.
    All issues from this list was created for old citeproc library and could be not actual.

    If you think the CSL rendered incorrect the most likely citeproc make something wrong. You can create issue there https://github.com/seboettg/citeproc-php/issues

    We can also check it but it requires a lot of our time and we already reviews a long list issues which needs to be merged.
    We say thanks users who make patches and RTBC. This helps us so much.

  • 🇺🇸United States mark_fullmer Tucson

    Reviewing the maintainer's response in #3, it seems like this may need to be something that is resolved through individual site updates to the CSL styles, in which case the best thing this module can do is provide comprehensive documentation on this.

    Leaving this issue as "Active," and marking as "Major" since correct CSL formatting is quite important!

  • 🇺🇸United States mark_fullmer Tucson
  • 🇺🇸United States mark_fullmer Tucson
  • 🇺🇸United States mark_fullmer Tucson
  • 🇺🇸United States mark_fullmer Tucson

    This meta issue was reviewed by me, a new maintainer in June 30. Each of the issues identified has been separately triaged and appropriate progress is being made. I'll therefore close this meta issue. Thanks!

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