Editing citation style

Does anyone know how to edit the citation style that is already embedded within the app? The citation style I am looking for is present in the choices but for some reason there are flaws that I need to edit for example the first letter of every word in the title must be all small letters instead of all caps. I opted to edit this manually but I have 300++ citations in my references so I don’t think it will be a feasible plan.

Thank you in advanced to anyone who can help me with this!

Hi Mary

All out citation styles come from the public repository at citationstyles.org and they also have a visual editor: http://editor.citationstyles.org/searchByName/

You can find your style, edit it, and then in Paperpile go to the cog --> Settings --> Citation Style to upload your edited style. It will immediately be available in google docs.

The styles can be fairly complex and can take a while to wrap your head around, but with the visual editor you can generally click the bit of the citation you wish to change which will bring you to the relevant variable. It sounds like you want to change the “text-case” attribute to Sentence Case, or Lower Case. Once you have edited the style be sure to examine the tree on the left for alternate cases. For example , if there is a conditional further up the tree, you may have only edited the sentence case for articles, but not books. Different citation styles use different conditionals to separate their formatting rules, so there’s no hard and fast rule here.

When you’re done, change the Title of the style under “info” in the left panel. To save the style click Style --> Save Style, above the left panel. It will prompt for a change of the style URL, accept this, and in the orange box that opens, click Save to Disk. Then upload it to paperpile as described above.

Let me know if you need further help.

Sincerely,
Jason

1 Like

Thank you Jason!! I will let you know if I will need further help!

Best,
M

Hi Jason,

So my problem now is that paperpile is not letting me upload the CSL file as a reference type. What should I do?

What error are you getting?

For reference, here are the steps:

Hi Jason, your window looks completely different from mine maybe because I have a free version :frowning:

This is what it looks like

Is this still the best method for editing custom reference styles?

Indeed it is, @Eric_Potratz - we still fetch them from the CSL database, where they can be edited directly, downloaded and uploaded to Paperpile via Settings as outlined by Jason above.

I managed to make my own custom csl file, upload to my Paperpile account, but my Google Doc can’t ‘see’ it. Thus, I can’t select it as a citation style

Welcome to our forum, @C_Robin_Buell! Is this still the case? Are you searching with the exact title of the style you uploaded? It should appear like so -

If it’s not working, could you share the CSL file here or via chat/email (support@paperpile.com) so we can try to reproduce? Let me know.