When I started at YPFS, we did all COVID all the time. I’d wake up, get paid to doomscroll, and pump out some blogs about what was happening. When we reverted to case-writing, a huge backlog of cases had to be prepped for publication. Many of these were years-old. They neither shared common formatting nor common citations, and—because the cases were so old—the original authors had moved on to bigger and better things. We needed to solve all the problems that come with a team distributed not only across space but also time.
For literal centuries, publications have solved this problem with style guides and time-consuming editing practices. However, these are only as strong as their enforcement. Without savvy, patient editors and authors with hours to spare, editing for standardization rightfully takes a back seat to editing for clarity and content. A somewhat newer solution involves distributing Word templates that authors simply fill in, Mad-Libs style. But again, you run into the problem of enforcement. The first time a line breaks where you don’t want it to, or you copy the source style along with the text, the Word template ceases to be authoritative.
Moreover, for editors reviewing work years later, if citations aren’t perfect or comprehensive, finding the original document can be a bear. These systems do not link the product to the process. They allow authors to keep “two sets of books”: one, incomplete but well-formatted, that gets published; another, complete but unstructured, located somewhere without a link tracing to it. In this way, Word documents—for all the ways they liberate formatting and track changes—are little different from plain paper. We have had ways to connect product and process for years, but it is hard to generate buy-in. Some compromise between accessibility (plain-text editors aren’t familiar to most) and utility (e.g. Markdown would be ideal) is usually required.
Our compromise is the amazing reference manager Zotero. It builds citations using Citation Style Language (CSL). CSL imposes it style in Word documents using fields (kinda like those used often for page numbers or automatically updating dates) that it controls. In this way it is authoritative. Zotero feeds it information stored in its desktop app. What you put in is put out on the page. In this way it connects product to process: to create a correct and nice-looking bibliography requires citing throughout a document and inputting data correctly to Zotero, which is super easy to search and connects documents to their contexts on the web.
CSL, is also open source, which means that we could configure a style to our liking. While we mostly like Chicago (author-date) style, I and another Research Associate updated it with some contextual information. I learnt this XML-like language and have been deploying it with Git. It’s my first experience developing software that people actually use. This makes a huge difference! Working with something that will be used in the future by end-users made me think several steps ahead to maintain forward- and backward-compatibility, and reminded me how much I enjoy solving problems.
Check out the code here.