Please use the comments section of this page to submit additional suggestions for the CSL editor.
Suggestions from feedback.mendeley.com related to this project:
- Manually edit citation styles in Mendeley Desktop
There should be a way to manually edit the citation styles in Mendeley Desktop, preferably in a WYSIWYG editor. - Customized citation styles
As in Refwork, users can customize their own citation styles. I wish Mendeley can also have this function. This was because the journals I generally submit my papers to are not included in the citation styles provided by Mendeley. I wish I could customize one for my need. – Dongxi Zheng
CSL Editor Development Blog 
Very much need this feature! For me the citations styles are the usual chem places (ACS, Wiley etc) as well as the PLoS styles. These are pretty common. I agree it would be very nice to have the ability to manually alter and save your own styles.
The styles should be version controlled in a central location. If there’s a correction to the style, everyone get’s it automatically. You should also be able to preview the style on the web site.
a central (and obviously version controlled) repository for CSL styles exists already. https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles
How individual programs like Mendeley access it and use the regular updates is rather unrelated. This is were Mendeley (and Papers, Zotero, Quigga etc.) already get all of their citation styles.
I would like to see common Wikipedia citation formats covered, e.g. Cite journal (example at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Cite_doi/10.1371.2Fjournal.pbio.0030316&action=edit ).
I second the need for a central, version controlled repository of styles. If a new style is created, it can be associated with a link to the journal/publisher homepage, so that authors can check that it is still up to date.
It would be important to get automatically a formatted style in in other languages (e.g. german) and then could personalize it.
CSL already has the capability to do this and there are a decent number of specifically German styles available on the csl repository already.
This is absolutely necessary, as the existing styles in Mendeley do not satisfy every institution. Just as important, however, is for Mendeley to increase the number of fields available in its database. There is, for example, no place to enter the volume number in a multi-volume work. This is a crippling defect. (Series number is not the same thing.)
Often editing Wikipedia articles (and for this using Zotero…) I would rather use Mendeley if it works like Zotero since April 11th, 2007:
https://www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-wikipedia-perfect-together/
and export “Wikipedia Citation Templates” by an easy Drag-and-Drop!
It would also be nice to allow users (or others) to input journal-specific citation styles, as some journals use variations on mainstream styles.
there are around 1500 journal specific styles available in CSL already. https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles
I use bibtex. My main issue is that I still have to edit mendeley created bibtex file to make sure that journal abbreviations are proper. Is there any other way to do it ?
CSL is not designed to produce bibtex – and Mendeley doesn’t use CSL for it’s bibtex export. So whether or not this can be fixed is unrelated to the work on a GUI csl interface.
Not only proper export to bibtex is a nice to have. It should work the other way around as well, i.e. importing of bibtex style files should be possible.
1) Ability to customize my own style, using WYSIWYG, or by answering a list of questions so that Mendeley’s citation builder can create what the reference would look like and I can approve, or change again.
2) I don’t think these custom citation styles need to be viewable by others (why would you want to see how I need to cite my dissertation according to my university’s particular standards?), but could be exportable to friends/colleagues who need to use the same style.
3) my custom citation styles should be available to me upon logging into Mendeley, regardless of which computer I am using.
At the moment I use Mendeley to manage my library and Endnote to do referencing in my papers. Adding better citation support to Mendeley would nicely unite both these tasks. For me to use this feature it would be necessary to have user editable styles. It may require some sort of scripting but WYSIWYG would be definitely better ;-). I would be happy if the styles are accessible from my Mendeley account so that I can reach them on different computers. Public depository may be nice, as you would likely find the journal format you need already prepared by someone else but then it would also require some “non journal” categories (formats for theses, various internal documents) or to have both “public” and “private” styles.
The way CSL is designed, it is no problem to have private and public styles – there already is a public repository and you can already have private styles. My understanding is that the Columbia/Mendeley collaboration is specifically for a GUI CSL style editor, which would also benefit the multiple other programs using CSL.
Better support for creating or changing CSL files would be most welcome. I also would like to find more search opportunities in already created CLS files such as presented at https://www.zotero.org/styles. Especially the elimination of many entries from the set based on easily identifiable characteristics of the bibliography, such as:
* Capitals in Author names yes/no
* use of either Italics or bold font types in bibliography
* Use of AND, & or just a comma in seperating multiple authors.
I’ve been working as coordinator for development of a set of six complex and interrelated CSL styles (for law). Legal support in CSL is an important domain that I hope will expand in the near future, and I’m trying to keep and eye on ease of maintenance as I build out the styles. I’ve been mulling over a short list of rules and desiderata. Here’s the list, I hope it’s useful.
* It is important to avoid using leading prefix spaces and trailing suffix spaces, and joining punctuation (as opposed to brackets) is best handled by delimiters rather than affixes. This actually makes a huge difference to the robustness of a style, and it’s a policy worth enforcing pretty strictly.
* Code sharing between styles is possible, if provision is made for minor tweaks. I’m using a maintenance script that pulls specific macros and their dependents from a “parent” style for the target code to one or more dependent styles. Macros in the dependent styles are left untouched if there are differences only in the following attributes: [‘text-case’, ‘font-style’, ‘font-variant’, ‘quotes’, ‘delimiter’, ‘value’]. This seems to work well, and may provide a hint for the construction of macro libraries.
* What would be more helpful to me than a WYSIWYG editor is an IDE with real-time rendering capability, so that as I change the CSL code, I can see how a specific pattern of input (the sample input for whatever cite form or forms I’ve decided to work on) changes in the output as the CSL is refactored. It seems like this should be possible using node.js, ace, citeproc-js, and some sort of Ajax magic, although pulling all of that together would be a bit beyond my own abilities.
Hope this helps. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with.
There has been talk from time to time of the possibility of providing “reverse mappings” from CSL citation output back into the CSL structures. I seem to be getting ahead of some other work here, and I’d be happy to talk about this, if the team is interested. It depends on what level of precision is required (and on whether the team already have a solution in place), but I have an idea for mapping rendering nodes to chunks of output that might be fairly simple to implement. Let me know if you’d like to explore together.
Would be great to have capability
a) to manage different capitalization requireents, e.g. titles in APA and Harvard
b) to have different outputs for fisrs and the subsequent citations, e.g. first use to list all authors and subsequent use to use et al.
Thank you for the CSL editor.. I finally could make the layout of the citations as I wanted. Only problem was how to change “et al” in inline citation to “et al.” with the dot… It took me quite a long time to figure it out as I do not know the csl language. Maybe I am wrong but in the Visual Editor it is impossible. I found that I need to change it in a code in the tag at the biggining of the code after really long time of hopelessness.. (trying to change almost all the fields in the Visual Editor 🙂 I think these “term” fields also should be accessible in the visual editor as they generally influence all the rest of code…
Hello,
when playing with CLS Visual Editor (many thanks for this feature), I found this part of the code problematic:
I need all author names as uppercase, but there no name-part node in the online editor…
Any help. please ?
Well, it’s already OK, I fixed it within the online editor…
Many thanks once again for your amazing Visual CSL editor.
Hello again,
I spent some time with customizing citation style for our university.
However, I would need conditional variable “language” to tweek some item names, like
if lang=en
{use vol, no., p.}
else if lang=sk
{use roč., č., s.}
Any help, please ?
you can’t test for the content of language in standard CSL. If you’re interested, you can look at MLZ Zotero https://citationstylist.org/ , which supports an extended csl-m standard specifically for multilingual documents, but you won’t be able to do this in the visual editor (nor in Mendeley)
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I’m busy trying to create a CSL for a journal that has no style available on any of the repositories as of yet. All is going good, except that I’ve hit a snag for document types. In Mendeley there is the option to decide whether a document is a Journal article, bill, thesis or report. The editor however does not have the option to set a document type as a “Working Paper”. Is there any chance of adding the document type “working paper” to the editor so that it corresponds with the document types Mendeley offers?
Phillip – use the type “report” for working papers, that’s what all other styles do. The types in the editor depend on types available in CSL, which doesn’t have a working paper type and isn’t, as of now, planning to add one.