Preserve Quotation Marks as They Are in Bibliography With CSL

[TomBener]

I’m currently using a CSL file (gb-author-date.csl) in my project to format my citations. However, I’ve noticed that when I cite papers with titles that contain quotation marks, Pandoc converts all of them to double quotes, regardless of whether the original title used single or double quotes.

Here’s an excerpt from my markdown file:

---
title: "Test Quotes Style"
bibliography: bib.json
csl: gb-author-date.csl
---

Cite a paper the title contains the single quote [@owen2014].

Another paper the title contains the double quote [@randles2021].

For example, when I cite a paper with the key @owen2014 that uses a single quote in the title, and another paper with the key @randles2021 that uses a double quote in the title, both are converted to double quotes after the Pandoc conversion with pandoc -C test.md -o test.html:

<div id="ref-owen2014" class="csl-entry" role="listitem">
Owen J R, Kemp D, 2014. <span>“Free Prior and Informed Consent,”</span>
Social Complexity and the Mining Industry: Establishing a Knowledge
Base[J/OL]. Resources Policy, 41: 91–100. DOI: <a
href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resourpol.2014.03.006">10.1016/j.resourpol.2014.03.006</a>.
</div>
<div id="ref-randles2021" class="csl-entry" role="listitem">
Randles J, 2021. <span>“Willing to Do Anything for My Kids”</span>:
Inventive Mothering, Diapers, and the Inequalities of Carework[J/OL].
American Sociological Review, 86(1): 35–59. DOI: <a
href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122420977480">10.1177/0003122420977480</a>.
</div>

Click to expand `bib.json` content:

[
    {
        "id": "owen2014",
        "author": [
            {
                "family": "Owen",
                "given": "John R."
            },
            {
                "family": "Kemp",
                "given": "Deanna"
            }
        ],
        "container-title": "Resources Policy",
        "DOI": "10.1016/j.resourpol.2014.03.006",
        "issued": {
            "date-parts": [
                [
                    "2014",
                    9,
                    1
                ]
            ]
        },
        "page": "91-100",
        "title": "‘Free prior and informed consent’, social complexity and the mining industry: Establishing a knowledge base",
        "title-short": "‘Free prior and informed consent’, social complexity and the mining industry",
        "type": "article-journal",
        "volume": "41"
    },
    {
        "id": "randles2021",
        "author": [
            {
                "family": "Randles",
                "given": "Jennifer"
            }
        ],
        "container-title": "American Sociological Review",
        "DOI": "10.1177/0003122420977480",
        "issue": "1",
        "issued": {
            "date-parts": [
                [
                    "2021",
                    2
                ]
            ]
        },
        "page": "35-59",
        "title": "“Willing to Do Anything for My Kids”: Inventive Mothering, Diapers, and the Inequalities of Carework",
        "title-short": "“Willing to Do Anything for My Kids”",
        "type": "article-journal",
        "volume": "86"
    }
]

I understand that this behavior is controlled by the lang property. I can set lang: en-GB to use single quotes, but this property also affects other settings, which I don’t want to change.

Is there a way to cite papers with quotes in the title as they literally are, without any conversion? I want to preserve the original quotation marks used in the title.

[jgm]

Sorry, no. There isn't a way to turn off this feature (at least with a CSL JSON data source).

If you convert the CSL JSON bibliography to a markdown YAML one (pandoc -f csljson -t markdown -s), then there are things you could do to preserve quotes literally.

e.g.

title: |
    \"Free prior and informed consent\", social complexity and the
    mining industry: Establishing a knowledge base

will include the straight " quotes literally. Alternatively you could put in curly quotes (but keep the escapes).

[TomBener]

Thanks!