Zotero, Biblatex

Question

I have to write a seminar paper with special citation guidelines. I thought of using Zotero, but didn't find a similar style. I don't get how I can implement my guidelines, so I hope, there's someone who can help. It doesn't have to be with Zotero, just biblatex is also fine. The paper is in German. So here are the rules for the citation:

For the bibliography:

• The cites should be in alphabetical order
• The bibliography should look like a kind of table without the lines, so in the left column there will be the name, in the right column the other stuff
• The surname has to be italic
• If there are more than four authors/editors, then the first one has to be named with "et al." (for et alteri (and others))
• No academic titles
• Editors has to be marked with the suffix "Hrsg."
• The court decisions, laws, articles from daily press and cites from the internet should only be named in the foot cites, not in the bibliography
• If a book has more volumes, then every quoted volume should be recorded separately in the bibliography

Examples for the bibliography style:

• Essays: Name, First name (Column break) Full title of the essay, journal year, start and end page; E.g. Bernhard, Tobias (Column break) Das grobe Missvehältnis in § 275 BGB, JURA 2006, S. 801-811
• Monographies/textbooks: Name, First Name (Column break) Full tile, [edition] publishing place year (perhaps specification of the citation style in the foot notes); first editions should not be named
• Commentaries: Name of the commentary (Column break) perhaps other information of the volume or editor, [edition], publishing place year (perhaps specification of the citation style in the foot notes)
• Collected edition: Name, First name (Column break) Title, in: Name, First Name (Hrsg.), Title, publishing place year, start and end page, (perhaps specification of the citation style in the foot notes)

For the foot cites:

• Indirect quotes should begin with "Vgl." (for compare)

• Every cite should start with a capital letter and end with a dot

• Name of the author italic

• Separation of every cite with a ";", with numerous quotes court decicions for literature

• No references, so if need be the same cite in consecutive foot notes in the same way

Examples for the foot citation style:

• Court decisions: court source; E.g. BGH NJW 2019, 3385, 3386.
• Monographies/textbooks: Author name, title, page; E.g. Kleinecht, Verbraucherschützende Gerichtsstände, S. 25.
• Articles: Author name, journal's name year, start page, page of interest; E.g. Bernhard, JURA 2006, 801, 804.
• Commentaries/Collected editions: Authors name, in: editor/short title, title/short title, perhaps edition, norm, page number or margin number; E.g. Schlüter, in: MüKo-BGB, § 387, Rn. 4.

I hope I don't go overboard with the citation and examples, but that's how it should look like. I'm a bloody amateur with LaTeX and didn't manage to write my own citation style. So I'm desperate to get the guidelines done. I really don't expect someone to get my work done, and I know there are many guidelines to how to write your own citation style, but as I said, I'm really desperate and have the feeling, that my citation guidelines are completely different from the one's already there... So I look forward to someone to solve this miserable maze.

Thanks a lot, Louise

Answer 1

Even though there is some evidence to the contrary, questions asking for and answers providing the implementation of a fully-fledged style are usually a pretty bad fit for this site. Such answers take a very long time to write, can be hard to judge for quality (because there are so many aspects) and are not really helpful for other visitors of the site (unless they look for the exact same style).

Instead it is better to focus on particular aspects of the style you need to implement and ask about those separately. That way answers can be more succinct, be judged/evaluated more easily and are more useful for other people. I fully understand though that this is more work for those people who need the style.

The style you describe looks very German-law-y. So you might want to get started with one of the styles of the biblatex-jura2 or biblatex-german-legal package (there are also the older biblatex-juradiss and biblatex-jura, which may or may not work any more). See which of the styles available there comes closest to what you need. Then identify the things you need to change and ask specific questions about that.