Mendeley Reference Manager
For my own research, I use Mendeley’s reference manager, the Mendeley Web Importer, and Mendeley’s Microsoft Word plugin, which allow me to save papers and then automatically cite them in my articles. This generally saves time Bluebooking and worrying about cross-references.
Citation Style Language (CSL) for Bluebooking
Most reference managers with Word plugins seem to use the citation style language (CSL) to format footnotes. The best Bluebook CSL template I could find was created by Bruce D’Arcus (Miami) and Nancy Sims (Minnesota). I made a few tweaks to theirs, and:
The modified CSL template is available here.
Instructions on how to install it in Mendeley are available here (the URL for the file is: https://csl.mendeley.com/styles/521287161/bluebook-law-review-Choi). I haven’t tried it with other reference mangers (like Zotero) but believe it should work for them as well.
The Word plugin also uses a file containing abbreviations for the names of periodicals. In Mendeley, you can change the file containing abbreviations by following the directions here (just replace the “Default.txt” file with the one below).
My modified journal abbreviation file is available here.
The CSL works well for journal articles, but doesn’t work as well for reports and books, and hardly works at all for legislation and court cases, since a reference manager is less useful for these sources. If the CSL or abbreviations are wrong, all feedback is appreciated!
FAQs
How do I add quotations in the Mendeley Word plug-in?
Quotations (and any other additional information) can be included as a suffix.
How do I de-italicize italicized words in titles (like “Cass R. Sunstein, Chevron Without Chevron”)?
A hack that sometimes works is to escape the de-italicized word as “</i>word<i>”.
When I add a quotation as a suffix, parentheses are changed into brackets. What gives?
This is apparently a known bug that Mendeley is working on; I haven’t found a way around this and just convert them all manually before publication.