Creating Zotero Citation Styles
Making a citation style for Zotero is difficult mainly because there are only few good 'how-to' manuals. As I needed to make a somewhat
specific style sheet, I thought that it might be a good idea to share my experiences, which may get other newbies started on this issue.
Preparation
In order to make a citation style sheet, it helps to know a bit about XML. As this 'how-to' guide is not intended to be a course on XML,
those who do not want to learn XML have to learn by doing. For others, it may a be helpful to know that web pages (especially the newer ones)
are basically (semi-)XML, so learning a bit of HTML may also be a good preparation (e.g. HTML goodies)
As a citation style is an XML document, an editor (XML, HTML) is going to make life a bit easier. It is possible to make the document in any
editor (e.g. wordpad), but a good XML editor with syntax highlighting will prevent you spending a lot of time looking for typos that may cause
all kinds of errors.
The other tools that are going to be of help are:
With this everything is prepared to start making citation styles