Bluebook Citations Fixer

Zotero plugin that rewrites rendered citation text to apply Bluebook rules that are awkward or impossible to express cleanly in CSL alone.

⚠️ This plugin is in active development and possibly buggy. It seems to be working well, but use at your own risk.

Install

Download Bluebook_Citations_Fixer_v1.2.0.xpi and install it via Zotero → Tools → Plugins → gear menu → Install Plugin From File.

💡 Pairs with Bluebook Signals — installing both is recommended.

🚨 Requires the Epps Bluebook CSL style

This plugin runs when your document uses Dan Epps’s Bluebook style (or its experimental variant) — under other citation styles it stays dormant by default and changes nothing. You must install and select one of those styles for the fixer to do anything.

• Get the style: BluebookDSEStyle.csl
• More info: danepps.github.io/bluebook
• If the style isn’t installed yet, the plugin’s Settings pane offers a one-click Install style button.

(The Epps styles are always active — no setup needed. To run the fixer under additional styles, check them in Settings → BB Citations Fixer → Style gate, where the traditional Bluebook Law Review style is offered first-class, or check “Apply under all citation styles”.)

🔄 Run a full refresh to apply the rules

The document-aware rules don’t update as you type — you must run a full Zotero refresh (the Refresh button in the Zotero tab of your word processor) after adding, editing, or removing citations. Adding or deleting one cite changes what other cites should say, and only a full refresh re-runs every citation in the document.

• Need a refresh: the hereinafter rule and the “Break id.” short-form fix — both depend on the whole document (who shares an author, how often a work is cited, which footnote a source first appears in).
• Apply on insert too: the journal volume/year and book “, at” fixes are local to a single cite, so they take effect immediately — but a refresh never hurts.

When in doubt, refresh — it’s the only way to guarantee every rule is applied consistently across the document.

Current Features

• Hereinafter support for ambiguous same-author works
  • First full cite gets [hereinafter Author, <short title>] — placed before any explanatory-parenthetical suffix you’ve added to the cite, per Rule 4.2(b)
  • Subsequent supra note cites get the short title inserted before supra note
  • Only fires when the work actually has a subsequent cite — no [hereinafter Short] tags on works that are never referenced again
  • Book-like items render the author surname and short title in large-and-small caps per Bluebook rules 15.1, 16, and B14; chapters are the exception and render like articles (italic title, roman author) since only the containing book takes small caps under Rule 15.5/B14; “et al.” stays italic
  • Id. cites, including signal-prefixed forms such as See id., are never given a [hereinafter ...] tag
  • Editing a short title in the Zotero library is picked up on the next document refresh without needing to re-insert the citation
• Suppress the trailing year parenthetical for journal articles when the volume itself is a four-digit year-like number
• Insert , at for qualifying citations when a title ends in a numeral and the rendered cite would otherwise look like ... 1868 45 (2006). Works regardless of what follows the pincite — (YYYY), (rev. ed. 2005), (Sarah Smith ed., 2010), citing-parentheticals, or nothing at all. Handles compressed page ranges like 403-07 whether the CSL style renders the separator as a hyphen or en-dash.
• Manual “Break id.” toggle. A checkbox in the citation dialog’s bubble settings (under Omit Author) flags a cite whose immediately preceding same-source citation is hand-typed — invisible to Zotero, which then wrongly renders the cite as Id. When flagged, the plugin rewrites that Id. into the correct Bluebook short form: Author, supra note N for secondary sources (italic supra; the hereinafter rule adds the short title when the author is ambiguous; authorless works are cited by title), or Short, Vol Reporter at Pincite for cases. Only the Id. [at pincite] span is replaced — signals you typed before it and suffixes after it (e.g. an explanatory parenthetical) are preserved, and multi-pincites like Id. at 12, 15 come through whole. The flag is invisible and persists across refreshes. First-cite long forms, statutes, cases missing the reporter/volume, and documents without footnote numbering are detected and left untouched.
• Style gate. The plugin always runs under the Epps Bluebook style and its experimental variant — that’s hard-wired, so it can never accidentally go dormant under your own styles. Under every other style it stays inactive unless you opt in: Settings → BB Citations Fixer → Style gate lists your installed citation styles as checkboxes (with the traditional Bluebook Law Review style pinned at the top) and offers an “Apply under all citation styles” switch. Styles missing from the current machine get a one-click Install style button. If the active style can’t be read for any reason, the gate fails open so the plugin never silently stops working.

Companion plugin

This plugin pairs with Bluebook Signals, a Ctrl+S signal picker for the citation-dialog Prefix field (See, E.g., Accord, etc.). The two are built for the same law-review workflow and are meant to be used together — installing both is recommended.

Compatibility

Zotero 7 and Zotero 10 beta on macOS, Windows, and Linux. RTF output only — Word and LibreOffice work; Google Docs is not yet supported.

Latest Released Version

• 1.2.0
• Git tag: bluebook-citations-fixer-v1.2
• GitHub release asset: Bluebook_Citations_Fixer_v1.2.0.xpi

Release History

See ../CHANGELOG.md for the full history. Recent releases:

v1.2.0

• Epps Bluebook styles hard-wired into the style gate — the fixer always runs under the main and experimental Epps styles, with no configuration to drift out of sync.
• Style-gate checkbox picker in Settings: an “Apply under all citation styles” switch, a pinned option for the traditional Bluebook Law Review style, a checkbox per installed style, and one-click Install style buttons when the Epps styles aren’t installed on this machine.
• “Break id.” improvements: keeps your suffixes and multi-pincites, supports authorless sources (title-based supra form), and never emits supra note 0.
• Hereinafter placement: the [hereinafter ...] bracket lands before an explanatory-parenthetical suffix, per Rule 4.2(b).
• Robustness & speed: RTF splices can no longer produce unbalanced output that Word rejects; Google Docs (HTML) sessions are passed through untouched by both hook paths; refreshes on large documents skip a redundant per-field round trip.

v1.1.0.1

• Style gate. The fixer now checks the document’s active CSL style and only rewrites citations when it matches the configured style ID (default: Dan Epps’s Bluebook style), so it stays dormant under every other style. Surfaced in Settings; clearing the box restores the old “apply under all styles” behavior, and an unreadable style fails open so the plugin never goes silently dark.

v1.0.0

• First stable release. Promotes the 0.2.x line to 1.0 with no behavioral changes since v0.2.0.

v0.2.0

• Manual “Break id.” toggle. New checkbox in the citation dialog (under Omit Author) flags a cite whose preceding same-source citation is hand-typed and therefore invisible to Zotero, which otherwise renders the cite as Id. The plugin rewrites the wrong Id. into the correct short form — Author, supra note N for secondary sources (italic supra, composing with hereinafter when the author is ambiguous) or Short, Vol Reporter at Pincite for cases. First-cite long forms, statutes, and cases missing reporter/volume are detected and skipped.

v0.1.18

• Hereinafter options + Settings pane. The hereinafter rule is now configurable from Zotero’s Settings under BB Citations Fixer:
  • A checkbox toggles whether same-author works that do not first appear in the same footnote still get hereinafter treatment (the frequency path).
  • A numeric field sets how many times each such work must be cited for that path to apply (default 3, minimum 2).
  • Defaults preserve the prior behavior; works that first appear together in the same footnote always receive hereinafter treatment.
• Removed the Tools → “Bluebook Citations Fixer: Status” menu item (a testing aid). File diagnostics (/tmp/bluebook-citations-fixer-diag.txt, enabled via the …diag pref) and Error Console reporting are unchanged.

v0.1.17

• Chapters now render like articles instead of books: only the containing book takes small caps (Rule 15.5/B14), so a hereinafter naming a chapter uses an italic title and roman author.