Modified CSE Format for Zotero

If you are a UW Tacoma student who uses Zotero as a reference manager (as I suggest my students do), you can now output a bibliography in the modified CSE format that we use in our science courses at UW Tacoma. The hallmarks of the modified CSE format are:

• It’s based on the standard Council of Science Editors Author-Year format, available for Zotero here.
• Electronic articles and e-books are cited as if they are in print, avoiding the clumsy URL and access information that is useless outside the UW campus.

So, for example, here is a bibliographic entry in the standard CSE format:

Hodges KV. 2000. Tectonics of the Himalaya and southern Tibet from two perspectives. Geological Society of America Bulletin 112:324–350. [accessed 2015 Apr 14] http://gsabulletin.gsapubs.org/content/112/3/324.full

Note that the link won’t work unless you have access to Geological Socienty of America publications, which most students don’t at home. The link gets even more convoluted when you are trying to find an article through EBSCOHost or another repository that stores the articles behind a paywall. I see this all the time in student papers. So instead, using this format, you can reference the article as if you had it in print:

Hodges KV. 2000. Tectonics of the Himalaya and southern Tibet from two perspectives. Geological Society of America Bulletin 112:324–350.

Easier, huh?

Here is how to download the file to the Zotero Standalone application:

1. Download the format file here.
2. Open Zotero
3. Click on the Tools menu -> Preferences
4. Click the Styles tab.
5. Click the + button.
6. Navigate to the file you downloaded (modified-council-of-science-editors-name-year-author-date.csl) and select it.
7. Click OK. Now use it in good health!