When authorship is attributed (CMOS 17 14.79)

John P. McCaskey

What is the best way to handle cases where authorship is not specified in a publication but is known? Chicago 17 14.79 says to use brackets and gives this example:

Note:
1. [Samuel Horsley], On the Prosodies of the Greek and Latin Languages (London, 1796)

Bibliography:
[Horsley, Samuel]. On the Prosodies of the Greek and Latin Languages. London, 1796.

I don’t see a flag for “Attributed author” and I don’t see where to place brackets so that both note and bibliography come out correctly.

adamsmith

I don't believe we have a way to handle that that will work for both footnote and bibliography, sorry. I guess I'd enter the author as [Samuel Horsley] in single field mode and then fix the bibliography by hand at the end (knowing that you'd have to go through all attributed authors.

John P. McCaskey

It seems that if there were a flag (or I could re-purpose some field as a flag), CSL could wrap the author with [ ] if the flag were true.

adamsmith

it's certainly possible to do in a custom version of the style, yes. Note that CSL won't let you test for content of variables, so you'd want to pick a variable that's never used. E.g., assuming attributed authors only appear for books (as seems plausible) you could do something like

<choose>
<if variable="issue" type="book" match="all">
<text macro="contributor" prefix="[" suffix="]"/>
</if>
<else>
<text macro="contributor"/>
</else>
</choose>

And then you could add
Issue: Attributed author into the Extra field for the books in question. I haven't tested this & it might cause some oddness with the text appearing elsewhere. You could also use a variable like "Annotation" which is never produced by Zotero out of the box.

John P. McCaskey

Thanks. I used macro="contributors" and that worked.

(@adamsmith, what markup do I use to set off code as you did?)

John P. McCaskey

FYI @kleerr. This might work for you.

kleerr

Thanks John for alerting me to this discussion. I don't have any prior experience with CSL. But the approach suggested by @adamsmith is better by far than the one I'm using now (tossing square brackets into the author field in single-field mode) and, should any manual post-processing still be required, will make the end product far more reliable.