Integrating Citations From Zotero Into WordPress With Zotpress, Critically?

With the majority of journals and academic research references moving online, learners and educators in post-secondary are building digital citation management and digital research dissemination practices into their research workflow. This post begins with a brief discussion of the accessibility of Zotpress from the perspective of a site author with disabilities who is installing and using it. Zotpress is a third-party data API that fetches citation data from a user’s library in Zotero, a popular, citation manager and feeds them to a user’s blog in WordPress, a popular content management system and publishing platform. Then, the post takes a step back to raise questions about the digital accessibility of common citation practices in digital versions of academic journals.

Zotero: It Deals With Data so I Don’t Have To

I really like the citation manager Zotero. I like that with the click of a button, it pulls all the available citation data from digital files. I like that it limits spelling errors and keystroke errors in my reference lists. I like that it is easy to organize my research files into collections and its search mechanics are robust. I love that it works alongside my text-to-speech reader without issue and I value the organizational muscle of the machine. Yes, I have to check what it pulls. And, yes it can make mistakes. But more often than not, in that beautiful moment halfway into an article when you start to get the tingling feeling that this will be juicy, it is entirely sufficient to click the Zotero icon and let the machine do the work while you keep your brain in the game.

I have the Zotero extension in my Chrome browser. If you’ve never used it, getting citation data into the tool is as simple as clicking the Zotero icon when you are reading an article you want to save. The extension opens a window asking you what collection you want to save it in and boom, the title, author, media type, publisher… all the data required to appropriately cite references, according to the rules of all the major various style guides, is grabbed from the page’s meta data and saved in your collection. I also use the Zotero plugins in both Word and Google Docs. The plugins fetch citation data in your specified style guide’s format to paste it into your document. Again, it isn’t always perfect but it saves so much time and headache compared to managing citations manually.

ZotPress: Pretty Accessible Plumbing

A 3rd-party plug-in called Zotpress has been connecting WordPress blogs with Zotero library data since 2011 (Zotero Blog » Blog Archive » Introducing: Zotpress, 2011.). Like the Zotero plugins for Word and Google Docs, Zotpress has a feature that can automatically fetch and generate in-text citations and bibliographies for the WordPress environment from a users complete Zotero library or from a specified collection. Unlike the plugins, Zotpress can also pull an item’s abstract, tags, notes and attached downloadable media. (Note: you should only pull and publish downloadable content from your Zotero library if you have permission to publish it or it is from an OPEN source, such as the Creative Commons. Allowing readers to download commercially published articles from your Zotero library will impinge on copyright).

Easy to Find and Follow Zotpress’ Setup Instructions

As a self-described sighted–ish user, I found the step-by-step integration process relatively straightforward. The Zotpress instructions are well-written, and tips and help content is right on the page, not hidden in hover text or popups.  ZotPress has good ratings and because of it’s popularity, various sites offer additional tips for using the plugin, such as How To Use Zotero With Web Publishing.

Users should be able to display group collections on any page using a shortcode, and the Zotpress help in WordPress includes shortcode examples for common requests. It also offers some troubleshooting guidance relative to server settings that would likely be beyond a casual WordPress user’s domain. I forwarded them to a colleague helping with my site setup to check understanding and he was able to make the necessary adjustments in the back end.

I am able to see the content of my collections in the back end of the site (see photo below) but in some instances, the front end gets stuck displaying the spinning cog of doom or the shortcode instead of the data. This may be a caching issue or an error with how I’ve authored the shortcode. It works in some places and not others. The API uses a live call to Zotero, but I’ve found I sometimes need to refresh the collection in WordPress to access newly added items or pull updated citation data.

I will need to troubleshoot further but generally, Zotpress is starting to work on this website. For example, I’m using it to populate the abstract field in the annotated bibliography entries in the library section of the site to save me copying and pasting. I can also author in-text citations in the more traditional-style blog posts, such as Academic Accommodations.

I’m considering sharing some of my Zotero collections as a resource similar to this “Scholarship About Hypothes.is” reference page on the Hypothes.is website. Zotero subcollection names can be displayed as headers, and each item in the library can be shared as a complete citation, complete with hyperlinks for DOI or URL. 

Using In-Text Citations in a Blog: I can, but should I?

Now that I have set up the tools more or less correctly, and I can see in-text citations in some of my blog posts, I find myself questioning my use of the tool. If you are an educator, considering using Zotpress to build a blog for your course, what follows is my deliberations about digitally accessible citation practices, alongside some educator reflection prompts. There are no easy answers here but there are lots of questions.

A sighted reader who is skilled at reading dense academic text decides almost automatically if they will cognitively log or skip past in-text citations. They can visually skim half a dozen names, while relatively effortlessly holding onto the thought that’s been visually interrupted by the citation. With fluency in the domain, a reader might instantly connect the citation to foreknowledge of the cited work, or if a citation is unfamiliar, they might opt to highlight it to look up later.

Unless the use of citations is egregious, which happens, the reading flow for sight readers is relatively uninterrupted by the use of in-text citations whether they are reading a print or digital version of a text. The experience of reading in-text citations is very different, I would say inequitable, for audio-supported readers, meaning people who use screen readers and text-to-speech technology to read digital texts.

I can’t stand in-text citations

As someone who uses text-to-speech technology to read, I have to admit, I can’t stand in-text citations. Various readers handle in-text citations differently. Some give no indication that they are reading a citation; a listener is often halfway through a meaty idea when they have to listen to the text reader butcher five names and dates before returning to the idea. Other readers preface each unique citation with “cite” which at least explains to the listener why the regularly scheduled programming has been interrupted by names, but it also adds to the noise.

I can cognitively consume one or two names in in-text citations when they are scattered here and there in an article. More if I’m very familiar with the authors or works being cited. Unfortunately, academics are trained to cite in various ways and many authors seem to take a more is more approach to citation.

If you can see the image of the article above, you will see that the 21 in-text citations spread across 20 lines of text have each been hyperlinked in a bright orange font. I can imagine this colour treatment on the font would make it perceptibly and cognitively challenging even for sight readers to absorb the content of the author’s work. As a text-to-speech reader, I can neither visually or audibly scan past the 21 citations. The constant interruptions to the writer’s train of thought effectively make the text inoperable and imperceivable, though technically my tech can both detect and read the text. I am not alone in this.

Reflection#1: Can you imagine feeling joy encountering 21 in-text citations in 20 lines of text?

Reflection#2: Can we pause to consider the cognitive load of these 20 lines? Is the citation practice accessible?

Reflection #3: Is this citation practice equitable across sight readers vs. audio-supported readers?

Context counts

In addition to in-text citations being perceptibly and cognitively challenging for some learners, I find the use of them quite loaded, and in the context of a blog, questionable. The character of the blog medium tends towards approachability. It is short, chunky and highly scannable both visually and/or by keyboard commands.

Blogs are “born digital,” as such there are a number of features and plug-ins that support digital accessibility (when used correctly). In the blog domain, authors and readers share an etiquette that tends to prioritize connection, ease of access and quick, mind you, transactional “bite-sized,” “consumable” and “user-friendly content”.

The character of the academic journal is that of a fundamentally exclusive, analogue medium. One that has been ported more or less thoughtfully into a digital space. Journals offer researchers a space for minds to meet and exchange ideas through peer-reviewed texts, but who is invited to meet and how their work is presented digitally deserves the critical consideration of educators as we curate for our courses, and choose to replicate or challenge accepted publishing practices, such as citation practices.

Uncritical digital practices privilege the able.

I appreciate that previously excluded voices are now being included in the academy, academic journals and conferences. As well, many privileged academic writers are working to acknowledge their positionality and decolonize their writing and citation practices with thoughtful language and deference to thinkers (academics and others) who influenced their work. However, institutional licences limiting access, rhetoric and research models that privilege certain “able” and “included” populations, and the taken-for-grantedness of how academic journals ought to publish texts, continue to foster exclusionary practices.

To see an egregious example of how journals patronize and push the work of scholars with disabilities to the sidelines, we can look at the introduction to a special edition on disability for Communication Design Quarterly Review, 2019. There, guest editor Sean Zdenek had to print the following addendum to the introduction.

The issue’s contributors carefully prepared their Word documents to be accessible when converted to PDFs by including alt text for figures and semantic tagging for headings. Access to these features was lost when the Word files were formatted to the journal’s specifications. As a workaround, I integrated authors’ alt text into their figure captions. If any reader would like to receive versions of the articles from this special issue that have been optimized for screen reader accessibility, please contact Sean Zdenek (zdenek@ udel.edu).

(Zdenek, 2019)

That’s right, the journal made the special issue on disability digitally inaccessible to people with disabilities. In the irony of ironies, this journal is written for and by technical communicators, web developers and people who teach people to develop and test information and communication technologies. When presented with digitally accessible materials, prepared for them by scholar-contributors with disabilities, the journal chose to set aside their expertise in digital communication and adhere to its own style rules, AKA ableist digital practices. Incidentally, the way this journal presents articles, my reader reads a copyright statement at the start of the article that isn’t visible to a sight reader and skips the author’s bio, which is visible.

So, yes academic journals are now available online, and that makes them easier for people to access. But the digital accessibility of any individual journal or journal article needs to be assessed. And as we work with these texts in online spaces like this blog, we must be mindful not to port the ableist, colonial, patriarchal, capitalist characteristics of the academic journal medium to our digital spaces.

In-text citations are to academic publishing what steep steps are to the academy, in a word, disabling.

It is difficult to separate ableism in academic publishing from ableism in the Academy. In Academic Ableism, Jay Dolmage, professor of English at the University of Waterloo applies a critical and disability studies-informed lens on the historic and contemporary manifestations of ableism in the Academy.

… higher education has needed to create a series of versions of “lower education” to justify its work and to ground its exceptionalism, and the physical gates and steps trace a long history of exclusion.

(Dolmage, 2017 pg. 3)

A central metaphor for Dolmage begins with the steep steps leading to the large iron gates or marble-columned entryway to a university. He acknowledges this metaphor was inspired by social change activist and author Ellen Cushman’s work, The Rhetorician as an Agent of Social Change. Where Cushman initially talks about the “approach” (the stairs) as a separation of space keeping academics removed from the community, Dolmage uses the metaphor to discuss the communities kept out of the Academy, specifically students with disabilities. (Go to pg 13 of this free PDF publication of Dolmage’s book Academic Ableism to see the “steep steps” metaphor depicted and fully articulated.)

Reflection #4: See how I avoided in-text citations in the last paragraph by using blog-appropriate, accessibility-friendly, contextual hyperlinks? But I popped an APA citation into the pull quote? Would you do it differently?

How to cite in digitally accessible ways is an open question. To give credit where credit is due, APA (the style association for Education) recently did a digital accessibility audit of its style guide rules and updated a number of its practices. Unfortunately, in-text citations were not in the scope of the audit.

One thing I know with certainty, those of us pondering these questions already owe a debt of gratitude to feminist, BIPOC, and specifically Indigenous scholars who are actively challenging the citation status quo. Because people questioned the taken-for-granted, because they were willing to be a pain in the zot to make change for their community, I feel like people like me have a responsibility to at least try to imagine inclusive, digitally accessible, interdependent, maybe even joyous citation practices that pay respect both backward and forward without overloading anyone’s cognitive circuitry. Want to help?

Final Reflection

What connections did you make between this post and your digital praxis?

What would you like to try doing differently?

Why?

What hurdles might block your path?

What would make this work more accessible to you?