Style Requirements

Style Requirements

Styles that are submitted to the style repository must conform to the following requirements:

1. File names should consist solely of lowercase roman letters (a-z), digits (0-9), single hyphens to separate words (-), and a ".csl" extension (e.g., "journal-of-results.csl" instead of "journalofresults.csl" "JournalOfResults.csl", "journal of results.csl" or "journal_of_results.txt"). Write out names in full, unless the abbreviated name is well known (e.g., "pnas.csl" and "plos.csl" are fine, but use "journal-of-results.csl" instead of "jor.csl").
2. For the style ID (set with <id/>), use http://www.zotero.org/styles/file-name (replace file-name with the actual file name, without the ".csl" extension, e.g. http://www.zotero.org/styles/apa for apa.csl).
3. The style link (set with <link href="..." rel="self"/>) must correspond to the style ID (e.g., <link href="http://www.zotero.org/styles/apa" rel="self"/>).
4. The style must be released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License (set with the <rights/> element). Use <rights>This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/</rights>
5. If your style is largely derived from an existing style, mark the original style as a template by including a link to it in the info section of your style, e.g. <link href="http://www.zotero.org/styles/original-style" rel="template"/>
6. If your style only targets a single language (e.g. American English if you're submitting a style for an American journal), set the default-locale attribute on <style/> to the desired locale (for the list of available locales, see https://github.com/citation-style-language/locales/wiki).
7. Make sure that your style validates against the CSL schema.

Finally, while not a strict requirement, we prefer XML that is indented with 2 spaces per level.