Zotero is a free tool for managing bibliographies and citations.¹ Over time, it gets even more useful for researchers in biblical studies. That’s particularly true if you use the styles for the

• Ancient Christian Study Bible (ACSB)
• Catholic Biblical Association (CBA),
• Society of Biblical Literature (SBL),
• SBL in-text bibliographies, or
• Tyndale Bulletin (TynBul).

Ancient Christian Study Bible

For editions of patristic works, the ACSB essentially uses SBL style. The main difference is that the ACSB doesn’t truncate page ranges (so, e.g., 115--117 rather than 115--17).

The trickier part is that the ACSB

1. only lists these works in their bibliography format and
2. lists them per pericope.

This scenario means you

1. need multiple bibliography sections in the same document and
2. probably also have the same work listed in more than one of those sections.

There’s an open request to add this style to the main Zotero repository. But for now, you can download the style and install it manually.

This style essentially works by outputting bibliography entries as if they were in-text citations. The entries will render and update based on the data in your Zotero library, but for in-text citations, Zotero isn’t able to

1. create new paragraph breaks between citations or
2. alphabetize the citations.

So, you’ll need to

1. enter each entry in its own paragraph and
2. do your own alphabetization of these entries

In this DOCX file, you can see a sample of how the in-text bibliographies render, as well as get some additional notes about using this style.

Catholic Biblical Association

The CBA’s style is what you’ll see in Catholic Biblical Quarterly. Zotero has supported CBA style for some time. Per CBA’s guidelines, the Zotero style now

• supports custom citations specified by CBA and stored in Extra via the annote variable (e.g., annote: BDF),
• allows series abbreviations to be stored in Extra via the collection-title-short variable (e.g., collection-title-short: NIGTC),
• truncates page ranges per the guidance of the Chicago Manual of Style (e.g., 115-116 becomes 115-16),²
• capitalizes English titles stored in sentence or lower case in “headline” style,
• gives citations with a sub verbo locator the s.v. notation and those with a section locator the § symbol,³
• overrides Chicago’s en dash with a hyphen when delimiting page ranges, and
• includes a period at the end of a citation.

The style now also comes without a few bugs that it had previously. These include

• correcting the output of a work cited with only editors as responsible parties from “, ed. [name(s)]” to “[name], ed.” or “[names], eds.”,
• correcting the delimitation and spacing with volume-page citations (e.g., “1:105”), and
• lowercasing “rev. ed.” and, if it appears other than at the start of a sentence, “ibid."

Society of Biblical Literature

Like CBA, SBL style requires you to cite a number of resources by specific abbreviations.⁴

Abbreviation-based Citations

Abbreviation-based citations are now supported in the Zotero repository’s SBL style. Not infrequently, you’ll use this kind of citation for dictionaries or grammars.

Commas before Locators

SBL style consistently calls for a comma before the abbreviation for “sub verbo” when you cite a source like BDAG.⁵ Other types of locators don’t get commas before them. These include

• section numbers or
• page numbers when you’re citing a multivolume reference work.⁶

So, at present, the Zotero style supplies a comma after the abbreviation when you select a “sub verbo” locator in the Zotero citation dialog. But the style otherwise omits one.

If you need a comma, you can include the comma as part of the abbreviation in the annote variable (e.g., annote: <i>ANET</i>,).⁷ Similarly, when citing signed dictionary articles, the style had been producing a comma before the locator. But SBL style calls for no comma to appear there, and that’s now the case.

Section Locators

For some time, citations with section locators had a space after § or §§ that shouldn’t have been there (thus, e.g., “§ 105” rather than “§105”). That’s now fixed too.

So, if you cite a grammar, you can just choose “section” as the locator type. You don’t need to drop in § or §§ as the first characters in the locator field. Zotero will take care of the rest.

Quotation Marks with Sub Verbo Locators

When citing lexicon entries from sources like BDAG or HALOT, SBL style wants the head word to come in quotation marks. The Zotero style will automate this behavior if you select the “sub verbo” locator type in the citation dialog box.

Support for Identifying Sources as Physical

When you have an electronic source that’s identical to its print counterpart, SBL style generally treats the citations identically.⁸ You can omit a DOI or URL in the citation because you’re citing a print-equivalent source. But in other styles—like that for the Tyndale Bulletin—you need to include a DOI or URL for a source whenever possible.

You can add or remove DOIs or URLs from your Zotero library as needed for a given style. But that’s entirely unnecessary busywork.

So, even if you have a DOI or URL stored for a given record, you can get the SBL style to suppress this information. To do so, just enter dimensions: yes in Zotero in that record’s Extra field.⁹

When you do, you’re telling Zotero to treat the source as something with physical dimensions. The citation then won’t include DOI or URL information.

Updated Citation Type Support

The SBL style for Zotero now also provides proper output for conference papers and individually paginated electronic journal articles.

Conference Paper Citations

The style has had some persistent errors when it came to citing conference presentations (e.g., missing out the conference name). But these errors are now corrected, and Zotero can produce the citation format described in the SBL Handbook of Style, 2nd ed., §6.3.8.

Individually Paginated Electronic Journal Articles

Since releasing the second edition of the SBL Handbook of Style, SBL Press added some special guidance for citing journal articles that are published electronically and paginated individually (i.e., each article starts with page number 1).¹⁰ Zotero can now produce departures that this citation type requires by comparison with “normal” journal articles. You can get this output as needed by adding number: to the Extra field, followed by the number of the article in the sequence for that issue.

Society of Biblical Literature In-text Bibliographies

This format’s essentially identical to the style for the ACSB. It too uses its own style definition separate from the regular SBL notes-bibliography or author-date styles. It’s main difference is that it reflects SBL Press’s preference for truncated, rather than full, page ranges (so, e.g., 115--17 rather than 115--117).

This style may be useful in contexts like annotated reading lists or syllabi. So, as with the ACSB style, there’s an open request to add this style to the main Zotero repository. And for now, you can download the style and install it manually.

Tyndale Bulletin

According to the Tyndale Bulletin style guide,

In most respects, Tyndale Bulletin follows the conventions described in the second edition of The SBL Handbook of Style.¹¹

Of course, Zotero has long supported SBL style. But there are important differences between some of the styles’ details. These differences include Tyndale Bulletin’s preferences for

• British-style punctuation for quotations and any punctuation appearing with them¹² and
• including a work’s Digital Object Identifier (DOI) whenever one is available.¹³

Quotations

You could spend quite a while adjusting punctuation by hand. But if you install the Tyndale Bulletin style, Zotero will handle the type of quotation marks required and the placement of punctuation with them. Just select the Tyndale Bulletin style as the one you want to use in a given document, and your citations will be good to go. You’ll just need to check and adjust any similar punctuation in the rest of your document.

DOIs

If you use the Tyndale Bulletin style, Zotero will also include any DOIs you’ve saved for the works you’re citing.

That said, if you don’t normally ensure you save a DOI when it’s available, you’ll have to add that information to Zotero. Otherwise, Zotero won’t know to include a DOI in a given citation.

It’s not hard to add DOIs where they’re available, however. Thankfully, there are some good tools you can use to help you streamline that process as well. (Though, at present, the Zotero DOI Manager plugin is only in the process of getting updated to work with Zotero 8 and 9.)

Conclusion

Citing sources is important work. And no matter how good software gets, you’re still responsible for the final product. So, you still have to know the style you’re writing in.

That responsibility never changes. But it also doesn’t mean you have to do everything by hand.

Careful use of tools like Zotero will go a long way. It’ll help keep your citations in order, and it’ll let you focus on the substance of your research and writing.

If you use the parenthetical citation-reference list version, your needs and the behavior you observe may differ.