Zotero HLCES bibliography workflow

This is a "how to" page about producing and formatting your bibliography which will give you an idea of what is available and hopefully facilitate your bibliography workflow.

At no point will this page provide you with a bibliography to work with or check the format of your bibliography or guarantee its correctness against given guidelines, such as the Aethiopica guidelines; you will still have to do it your self. No tool does all your work magically.

Whichever the output requiring a bibliography, be it an email, a paper, a web project, etc. the suggested bibliographic database is Zotero. The styles can be used with any software supporting CSL, but in such cases the data entry guidelines linked from this page may not apply.

We only use some of Zotero’s potential, but you may want to use much more for your own purposes.

The HLCES Zotero Style is the official style of the centre. The latest release is of 24 November 2017 (make always sure you have the latest!). It deals with 98% of the cases. So, if you have not used it, do that first to make sure the bibliography is correct.

What this means is that in the best and easiest case scenario, you will

1. enter data in zotero
2. enter citations in your file
3. compile the bibliography and style the citations with the HLCES Style

While this may work for small tasks, we all know that the above scenario is never real, so we will go into some more details:

1. Please, as a first step make sure you install Zotero and familiarize yourself with its functionalities. This will typically include installing Zotero Standalone (recommended) or as the plug-in for your browser.
2. Follow the instructions during installation to get also the Word / Open Office plug-ins, according to what you are using. The app will guide you.
3. Become member of the EthioStudies Group on Zotero. This is open for reuse, not for contributions. If you would like to contribute to the bibliography, request access rights to the administrator, Eugenia Sokolinski.
4. Add the HLCES Zotero Styles to your Zotero installation. N.B.: ONLY the online version on the official Zotero Styles Repository should be used. Please avoid local fixes which claim to use this style, instead submit changes to the style in the official repository if you think such changes can improve it, or ask the authors of the style for support.

N.B.: If you want to know how to enter bibliographic citations and references in Beta Maṣāḥǝft, you are on the wrong page. Here is how the guidelines are given for the XML editing workflow of that project. Code of conduct to enter data in the Zotero Group is obviously the same and is maintained by the project.

Working with a common group library and style brings great potential, but comes with great responsibilities. If you alter the common data for your own purposes, for example to get the result you want at that moment with a workaround you have found, well, you will break everyone else's workflow, which is not nice. Therefore please:

• Enter data in the Zotero Group library responsibly
• There is no reason to delete information from records imported from a catalogue, especially if we typically don't use it. In the past for example, unfortunately, many DOIs have been removed for excess of zeal in the cleansing of the records in the Group Library.
• To reuse the data for your own project copy the entries in your own library.
• Use the style in awareness of its current limitations.
• Be wise in your local work flow. e.g. remember that if you do local fixes to the output of a database generated bibliography and then update this bibliography, your local changes to the previously compiled bibliography will be lost, you will have to do them again.
• If you used the old version of these styles with the text processor plugins, you might have to refresh your document cache.

Please, do not expect the EthioStudies Group Library to be complete. We would welcome your contributions instead to broaden its coverage and improve the records.

The Beta Maṣāḥǝft Team has guidelines on how to enter data in the EthioStudies Zotero group library. If you do not have access to edit the library, but you use its data and perhaps the HLCES style, it is also important that you know those instructions.

Please note that there are two Hiob Ludolf Centre Zotero Style. Only one is the reference style, Hiob Ludolf Centre for Ethiopian Studies. The other are Hiob Ludolf Centre for Ethiopian Studies (with URL/DOI) and Hiob Ludolf Centre for Ethiopian Studies (long names) which respectively add the DOI and URL to the full citation and avoid the abbreviation to the initials of the author's names. This last style is the one used for the bibliography of linguistic studies published by Aethiopica. Throughout this page, where not otherwise specified, we always intend the main style. Some of the centre's publications will require you to use one or the other of the two variants.

There are also other styles in the citation repository which are dependant of the main style and have no differences from it:

• Aethiopistische Forschungen
• Aethiopica
• Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies

You can use Zotero to print a bibliography in any language. We have in our styles overwritten the default rules for English (en-GB) and German (de), the other languages will print as defined in the standard behaviour. This means you can use the same bibliography and style for your English, Italian, German, etc. articles. Just remember to set it up. If you do not set it up correctly, the style will default on american English. For Aethiopica you will need to set en-GB. In this github repository you find local copies and an additional variant style which does not make a citation distinction for Encyclopedia entries, both combinig long names and not.

Let's say you have found all bibliographic references needed in the group library, you have entered all your citations in the paper, you have compiled the bibliography in your file and.... the bibliography does not match perfectly the guidelines given by Aethiopica.

There are some cases in which you might need to do some edits. Do them at the very end! Some of these can be fixed with a tool at the bottom of this page, but even in those cases, think well if it is not better and faster to simply edit manually what the HLCES Zotero Style offers you.

If a fix is possible you will find a fix below, just click on the number

If you are working on your PhD or MA thesis, to a book or an article for the HLZ, please think about following these steps:

1. Start archiving your readings (which might not end up in your bibliography!) directly with Zotero. Thus follow guidance above.
2. Be precise and do not force the data model.
3. Request access to edit the EthioStudies Group Library
4. Following the guidelines, add titles which are missing
5. It could be wise to copy to your local library the records in the group library to use them for your work together with other titles. In the case you are using a text processing editor like Microsoft Word, this would simplify the citation entry. Otherwise, simply pay attention at the source of the citation you are adding, if it is in your local library or in the group library.
6. Use the HLZ citation style to print your bibliography
7. Check piece by piece the bibliography produced against the original copies to make sure all data is correct
8. Only once you are really sure nothing else cannot be added/fixed in the Group Library go on to the manual editing phase.
9. Unlink your article from the database, to avoid mistakenly updating and thus loosing your edits.
10. Make sure you do not have cases as the above listed in known issues and if so, correct accordingly
11. Open an issue about things you think are not OK with the style. We will add them here, trying to keep a complete list. We will also look for ways to solve these problems.

By doing so and working in this way you will save plenty of time and so will the other people who are correcting your work also save plenty of time, not to mention the time you will save to those who might reuse the record you have produced for the group library.