The Australian manual of style (AMOS) (stylemanual.com.au) is a ‘practical guide to help you produce clear, accurate, engaging content’. In other words, it is a style guide to help you with grammar, formatting, document structure, presenting data, designing graphs, writing about science, doing user research, and many other aspects of writing, editing and layout.
It has 6 main sections:
Engaging — who are you writing for, how can you best reach them?
Writing — how to structure your content, decide what is in and what is out, and write it effectively.
Editing — how to refine your work, present it consistently, reference it properly, and so on.
Showing — how to present information using graphics, diagrams and infographics, and incorporate them into the text.
Subject areas — tricks and conventions specific to various fields and subjects.
Resources — quick guides (these are really handy), terms to watch out for, and some other useful information.
Until the end of 2023, AMOS was a subscription-based product, but now it is free and open. Take a look!
It has considerable breadth. It covers the core of English but also gives specifics like how to present chemical equations and mathematics, when to italicise species names, what the current conventions are for presenting graphs, and so on.
First, I installed the desktop program from https://www.zotero.org/download/. In this case, it was Zotero-5.0.93_setup.exe. I chose ‘Custom’, but the installer did not give me any choices to make anyway.
The installer opened a browser page suggesting I install Zotero Connector for my browser, and create an account. Who am I to argue? I did both. But the LibreOffice plug-in said I did not have Java installed, but in fact I do, so it seems faulty. OK, I’ll try to install something. How about https://jdk.java.net/15/?
OK, we need to find a style close to AMOS. Let’s look here: https://www.zotero.org/styles. What is AMOS based on again? Bring up the AMOS pages on formatting references — Harvard? Let’s have a look at what AMOS does.
Characteristic features of the AMOS style for in-text citations include:
Minimal punctuation — for example, a citation might be (Smith 2008) and not (Smith, 2008) — note the missing comma
Ampersands in parenthetical citation, ‘and’ in noun citation — eg (Wang & Devine 2010) but ‘As noted by Wang and Devine (2010) …’
Use et al when there are more than 2 authors — that is, at most 2 authors are includes in the in-text citation
Where initials are used to distinguish authors, no punctuation us used — eg (Jones D 2010, Jones P 2010)
Semicolons only appear if separated entries include commas — eg (Smith 1996, 2004; Jones 1998; Miller 2010, 2014)
Characteristic features of the AMOS style for the reference list include:
Sentence case for book, report and article titles; title case for journal names only
En rule for page ranges, and all digits in page range — 123–145, not 123–45 or 123-145, etc
No use of quotation marks anywhere. Journal article name is just in roman, not in quotation marks
Book, report, journal, proceedings, web page (and other internet things with titles) in italics
Ampersand before last author
There are other characteristics, but we can use these for an initial cut. Browsing the styles, I look for one as close as any. It has a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License (sic! it should be ‘Licence’, in Australia at least), so I can use it. Now, what about editing tools?
Run Zotero. Choose Edit > Preferences > Cite > Styles > Style Editor; but first I have to have some content in Zotero for the previewer to format so I can see how it looks.
OK, So … on the Cite pane, I clicked on Get additional styles… Who Regional Office for Europe seems like a good place to start.
Editing was a combination of the visual editor noted above and applying the styles in Zotero to test them more fully. Then I tried the editor that comes with Mendeley; https://csl.mendeley.com/visualEditor/, but it’s the same one.
Anyway, plug away. For example, I have to remove the full stop from the end of ‘et al.’. The stop seems to be defined elsewhere, so I have to redefine et al, near the top:
I do this after the <info> section but before I start defining <macros>. Works OK.
This, and the rest, is mostly done by googling ‘csl <description of problem>’ and finding the requisite advice online, then testing against a comprehensive bibliography containing lots of test cases (types of publication, combinations of author, year and so on).
One very tricky thing in the publication style I am asked to follow is that one uses a comma to separate entries when none of the individual entries contains a comma, but semicolon otherwise. (See above.) Haven’t managed to do this yet!
This is some pretty tricky conditional formatting.
kcharselect is pretty handy for pasting non-keyboard characters into the Zotero database.
When I need to fix a type of entry that the built-in examples in the CSL visual editor do not include, I can export it to CSL/JSON from desktop Zotero and then paste it into the Add new reference box (Example citations > Advanced).
Here is an example of some code in CSL.
<!-- If both DOI and URL are given, print DOI only; if only URL, print URL; only print accessed date if a date is given -->
<macro name="access">
<choose>
<if variable="DOI">
<text value=", doi:"/>
<text variable="DOI"/>
</if>
<else>
<if variable="URL">
<group delimiter=" ">
<text value=", "/>
<choose>
<if variable="accessed">
<text term="accessed"/>
<date variable="accessed" suffix=",">
<date-part name="day" suffix=" "/>
<date-part name="month" suffix=" "/>
<date-part name="year"/>
</date>
</if>
</choose>
<text variable="URL"/>
<group delimiter=" "/>
</group>
</if>
</else>
</choose>
</macro>
What does it do?
<choose> delimits a conditional block.
<if variable=”DOI”> says “do the next bit if this entry has a non-empty DOI”
We then put in some text (“, doi:”) followed by the the text stored in the variable DOI.
We close the <if>, but the next block is an <else>, so only happens if the <if> is not true — that is, if there is no DOI given.
If there is no DOI and there is a URL, we insert the URL, prefixed by “accessed” and the date, given as DD Month YYYY.
We then insert the text stored in URL.
And close off all the <if>s and <else>s and suchlike.
So this bit inserts a URL if there is no DOI, but if both are present it just inserts a DOI (shorter, neater, and designed to be more stable over time). If neither is given, the entry closes off without inserting anything. Here is the output, using some test cases:
Examples with and without DOI, and URL.
Key points: Last entry has only URL, and only URL shows. Welberry and Whitfield has both URL and DOI in database, and gives only DOI. Fenner and Hawking are from the examples provided by the CSL editor, and I’m not sure if they give just the DOI or both. Second entry gives neither, and looks fine without.
Develop a useful suite of test cases (various combinations of authors and bibliographic types and fields). The ones that come with the editor are not very comprehensive.
Get used to switching between the code editor and the visual one. Once you get an idea of the basic syntax, work goes a lot faster in the code window. https://editor.citationstyles.org/codeEditor/
Regularly test the style in the desktop application — I found a bug in the online editor.
Become a friendly contributor to the forum — it is very vibrant and the answers come quickly and constructively.
The style I am working in does this for corporate authors:
In the body text:
As has been reported (WWF 2002), something or other…
And in the reference list:
WWF (World Wildlife Fund) (2002). Some report or other…
So, we need to insert the short form in the citation and also in the reference list, but in the latter case followed by a spelled-out version. This can be done in this style because we use so little punctuation. If we put WWF as the last name and (World Wildlife Fund) as the first. OK! But not a robust solution!
DSPACE 