Short titles of books not displaying in OSCOLA

sapereaude1789
Hi, I am citing a couple of books with long titles and would like Zotero to use the short title after the first citation. Alas, despite my having entered a short title for the books in Zotero, it keeps using the long title.

I use the OSCOLA (2021) style and have checked that my first citations of the book are active.

Thanks for your help!
  • adamsmith
    The style has that right in the code. Can you try in a new document for testing?
  • damnation
    You'd need to edit the style.

    If you look at the else-if for "subsequent" citations starting in 578 you can see that the macro with the name "title-short" is called only if citations need to be disambiguated.

    Therefore, go to line 599-601 and change:
    <if disambiguate="true">
    <text macro="title-short"/>
    </if>

    to

    <text macro="title-short"/>

    Then it will ALWAYS print out the title for subsequent citations.

    You'll need to follow this guide to edit the style!
    https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/style_editing_step-by-step
  • adamsmith
    Right, but OP says they're always seeing the long title.
  • damnation
    edited March 16, 2023
    I tested the above scenario and for a subsequent book citation it ONLY provided the author name. Hence my suggested fix. But I'll leave it to you.
  • sapereaude1789
    Thanks so much for your help, @adamsmith and @damnation! I tried editing the style, which didn't seem to work, and then tried in a new document for testing -- which worked. So there seems to be an issue with my current document.

    I delete and re-created the first citation of the books, but that did not change the subsequent citations to short title (even after I refreshed all at once as well as individually). The only thing that seems to work is if I manually re-create all the citations.

    Is there a quicker way of doing that?
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