Author-year with ibid (suppress author)

haug

In some fields/citation styles using the author-year format, it is common practice to omit redundant information when the same source is cited multiple times in a row (ie. without any other source being used in between). For example "One study found that A (Smith 2022). Bla bla bla. The same study also claims that X (2022, p. 97), cautioning that Z (ibid.)." There are variations (e.g. replacing the omitted parts with ibid, but the basic idea is the same.

I noticed, though, that there are very few CSL styles in Zotero that explicitly support ibid (by mentioning it in the style's name) and even fewer of these are author-year styles (Ibid. seems to be more common in footnote styles).

This makes me wonder: am I missing something or is there indeed almost no author year style supporting the ibid functionality? If so, are people manually removing the author when the same source is cited multiple times in a row?

Is there perhaps limited support for this feature in Zotero? I doesn't appear to be the case because there is at least one style ("Södertörns högskola - Harvard (with Ibid.)") that comes very close to producing my example above.

It outputs: "One study found that A (Smith 2022). Bla bla bla. The same study also claims that X (ibid. p. 97), cautioning that Z (ibid.)." Where the two last references are identical, i.e. referring to the same page in the same source.

So it seems to work but yet few of the styles seem to use it...

Is everybody just using Pandoc or Biblatex?

adamsmith

First, most styles using ibid don't mention it in the title -- they only do when there's a different alternative.
But then, ibid of author-year styles is virtually unknown in the anglo-saxon tradition: APA, ASA, MLA, Chicago, CSE, and the British implementation of ISO690 (on which most UK 'Harvard' styles are based) explicitly discourage its use, and the majority of styles are, of course, based in those traditions. The only exception here is references to the same work in the same paragraph, which in some styles like APA is done by just listing the page number, but Zotero/CSL can't tell 'same paragraph.
I've mostly seen ibid/ebd. in author-year styles used in Germany, and some of the German author-year styles do have it implemented.

haug

Interesting. Do you know what the rationale of those styles is, for discouraging ibid (and thereby encouraging repetitive references, even within the same paragraph, if I understand you correctly?

Or is it just the use of the abbreviation "ibid" that they discourage? I can see why they'd want to do that. But that is not the same as not using the ibid functionality in reference managers/ citation styles.

I can see why you'd want to avoid the incomplete reference ending up too far away from the full one (for many footnote/endnote-based styles this doesn't seem to be a concern at all, making it a cryptographic exercise of sorts to figure out what the actual reference is). I think Biblatex has a setting that limits ibid to the same page or so. That could be a surrogate for the APA rule, but does Zotero know about pages?

Anyway, thanks for explaining that

> most styles using ibid don't mention it in the title -- they only do when there's a different alternative.

So what's the easist way of figuring out whether a style supports ibid? I can come up with two ways: 1. apply them to a test document of the type exemplified in the OP, 2. Open the style and search for "position" in the code. Right?

adamsmith

So what's the easist way of figuring out whether a style supports ibid?

For all styles see https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/244344/#Comment_244344

I principally mean that style manuals discourage the literal use of ibid in author-year styles. Ibid. style behavior is allowed in many styles with a variety of rules, but it involves a lot of judgment calls around legibility, so we've never implemented it anywhere (and no, Zotero has no concept of pagination in a document).