Chicago author-date CSL styles for writing in Japanese, English, or both
🌐 日本語版はこちら → README-JA.md (AI-translated — when in doubt, refer to this English version.)
Welcome. This repository provides citation styles for people who write academic papers in Japanese, in English, or — the genuinely tricky case — in Japanese with English and other foreign-language references mixed in. If you use Zotero (or another reference manager that understands CSL), these styles will format your citations and bibliography for you, including the parts that most styles get wrong for Japanese: the punctuation, the name order, and the あいうえお sorting of authors.
This guide walks you through downloading, installing, and using the styles, slowly and from the beginning. You do not need to be technical to follow it. The repository also contains the small Python tool that generates the styles, but as a user you can ignore it entirely; it is described briefly at the end, in A Little Background.
One or two steps along the way look more alarming than they are — Zotero shows an error message during installation, for example. When that happens, the guide takes the time to explain what you are seeing and why it is fine.
- What are these styles?
- List of Styles
- Download
- Installation
- Updating a Style
- Using the Styles
- Known Limitations
- Troubleshooting & FAQ
- A Little Background
CSL stands for Citation Style Language. A CSL file is a small, plain-text file that tells reference managers such as Zotero and Mendeley exactly how to format your citations and bibliography: where the parentheses go, how authors' names are ordered, how the year is displayed, and so on. Journals and publishers each have their own rules, and a CSL file encodes one set of rules so you never have to format a reference list by hand.
The styles in this repository are Chicago author-date variants prepared for specific journals, and they come in pairs: a Japanese version and an English version of each.
- The English version is a conventional author-date style. If you write in English only, you pick it and use it normally; nothing more to learn.
- The Japanese version is the interesting one. It handles Japanese and foreign-language references side by side in the same document: Japanese entries are rendered with Japanese conventions (姓名 name order, 「」 quotation marks, Japanese punctuation), English entries keep their own conventions, and Japanese authors are sorted in あいうえお order by their kana reading. Most off-the-shelf styles cannot do this; it is the reason this project exists.
Both versions of a pair are generated from a single source, which keeps them consistent with each other — and also explains a harmless quirk you will meet during installation.
These are the styles currently available. Each journal has a Japanese and an English variant; pick the one matching the language you are writing in.
| Journal | Japanese | English |
|---|---|---|
| International Collaboration and Development Studies @ Osaka University | chicago-author-date-iczemi-ja.csl | chicago-author-date-iczemi-en.csl |
| Journal of Kyosei Studies @ Osaka University | chicago-author-date-kyosei-ja.csl | chicago-author-date-kyosei-en.csl |
| Journal — Mirai Kyoso @ Osaka University | chicago-author-date-kyoso-ja.csl | chicago-author-date-kyoso-en.csl |
| Africa Educational Research Journal | chicago-author-date-aerj-ja.csl | chicago-author-date-aerj-en.csl |
| Journal of International Development Studies | chicago-author-date-jids-ja.csl | chicago-author-date-jids-en.csl |
If the journal you need is not listed, see the FAQ — you can ask for it.
In the List of Styles above, right-click the style you want and choose Save link as… (the wording varies slightly by browser), then save the .csl file somewhere you can find again, such as your Downloads folder.
The links always point to the latest release, so a file downloaded today is always the most recent version of that style.
A note of reassurance: a .csl file is plain text. If your browser warns you about downloading an unfamiliar file type, there is nothing to worry about — you can open the file in Notepad or any text editor and read it yourself before installing.
These instructions are for Zotero, which is free and what I recommend. (The styles are standard CSL, so other managers that accept CSL files work too; consult their documentation for the install step.)
- Open Zotero.
- Double-click the
.cslfile you just downloaded. Zotero asks whether you want to install the style — confirm. - If you installed a Japanese style, an error message appears. This is expected, and it is safe to click OK. Here is why it happens: each Japanese style is built from a single source file that produces both Japanese and English rendering, which is more than Zotero's style validator expects to see, so it complains. The style installs and works correctly all the same. (English styles install without any complaint.)
That is the whole installation. The style now appears in Zotero's style list — in your word processor plugin under Document Preferences, and in Zotero itself under Edit → Settings → Cite.
For more detail on how Zotero handles styles in general, see the official documentation.
There is no separate update mechanism, and you do not need one: simply repeat Download and Installation. Because the download links always serve the latest release, reinstalling a style replaces your old copy with the current version. If a citation looks wrong and you suspect the style has since been fixed, reinstalling is the first thing to try.
How much you need to do depends on the language you write in.
Choose the English style for your journal and use it normally. You are done; nothing in the rest of this section applies to you.
Choose the Japanese style — and then give Zotero two small pieces of information for each Japanese entry in your library. The style cannot guess which language an entry is in, nor how a Japanese author's name is read, so you have to tell it. Without these two steps, Japanese entries will not render properly.
-
Set the language. In the entry's Language field, enter:
jaThis is how the style knows to apply Japanese conventions (name order, punctuation, brackets) to this entry while leaving your English references alone.
-
Add the kana reading of the author's name. In the entry's Extra field (Zotero calls it Extra; the CSL term is note), add a line like:
name-kana: やまだ たろうThis is what lets the style sort Japanese authors in あいうえお order in the bibliography. Kanji alone are not enough — 東 could be read あずま or ひがし — so the reading has to come from you.
Foreign-language entries (English and others) need nothing special: leave their Language field as it is (or set it to en), and they are rendered in the usual author-date way alongside the Japanese ones.
I would rather you found out here than in your bibliography. Due to limitations of the citation processor, the following currently need to be edited by hand in the final document:
- Names in Katakana (for example, foreign authors written as セイメイ) are displayed like Japanese names, without the separating punctuation they should have.
- It is not yet possible to put a space between family name and given name (姓 名) in Japanese entries.
Both are on the list to fix as the processor allows. Until then: generate the bibliography, then make these small corrections manually before submission.
Zotero showed an error when I installed the style. Is something broken? No — if it was a Japanese style, this is expected. One source file produces both the Japanese and the English rendering, which Zotero's validator does not anticipate, so it complains. Click OK; the style installs and works. See Installation.
A Japanese entry is being formatted like an English one.
The entry's Language field is probably empty or wrong. Set it to ja exactly. See Using the Styles.
My Japanese authors are sorted in a strange order.
The bibliography sorts Japanese authors by their kana reading, which you supply via name-kana: in the Extra field. Entries missing it cannot be sorted correctly. See Using the Styles.
How do I update to the latest version of a style? Download it again and reinstall; the links always serve the latest release. See Updating a Style.
Can I use these styles with Mendeley or another manager? The files are standard CSL, so in principle yes — managers that accept custom CSL files can load them. They are developed and tested with Zotero, though, so that is the supported path.
The journal I need is not in the list. Can it be added? Possibly! Open an issue on the GitHub repository with the journal's name and a link to its citation guidelines. Because the styles are generated from a shared template (see below), adding a new journal variant is often a small job.
The styles in this repository are not written by hand, one file at a time. They are generated by a small Python tool — the pycsl.py you can see in this repository — which reads a configuration spreadsheet (input/config.xlsx) and a base Chicago author-date CSL template, and emits the Japanese/English pair for each journal.
This design has two consequences you may actually care about as a user. First, it is why one source file covers both languages — and why Zotero grumbles once during installation of the Japanese styles. Second, and more usefully: when a formatting bug is fixed in the shared template, the fix propagates to every style at the next release, so all the journals' styles improve together.
I originally built this to solve my own problem: citing Japanese and foreign-language sources together in one paper, with correct conventions on both sides and あいうえお ordering, is something off-the-shelf styles simply did not handle. If it saves you the hours of hand-formatting it was written to avoid, it has done its job.