new renaming for multiple authors (et al)

lisa.levinson

Thanks for the new Zotero 7, I'm just trying it out! I previously used Zotfile, and I'm trying to figure out the new renaming rules for multiple authors. Essentially I'm trying to reproduce the behavior of Zotfile with the option it had for "add suffix when authors are omitted", where I had it set as "-etal".

I would like the file to be named with max two author family names (otherwise first author with "etal"), and then append "etal" without a period. I have tried several options but can't find any way to get two authors with the "etal", or how to remove the period from that suffix. There is nothing in the documentation about this.

Examples of desired behavior -

if two authors: knox-yang-2024-title.pdf

if three+ authors: knox-etal-2024-title.pdf

Right now I have:

{{ authors max="2" join="-" name="family" case="lower" replaceFrom="\s+" replaceTo="_" regexOpts="g" suffix="-" }}

but this gives for three authors knox-yang-2024-title.pdf, which makes it look like a two author paper. If I use firstCreator, I can't get the two authors, it does replace everyone but first author with "etal." (two authors would also come out as knox-etal.-2024-title.pdf). So there appears to be some logic about replacing omitted names, and I'm not sure how to modify the behavior, or if I need to write my own conditional statements.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

enzmann

The following should do what you want (I took it from a comment here: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/470491#Comment_470491)

{{ if {{ authors match="[^,]+,[^,]+,[^,]+" }} }}
{{ authors max="1" suffix="_etal" }}
{{ else }}
{{ authors join="_" }}
{{ endif }}

lisa.levinson

Thanks so much - I had to tweak it a bit but this got me on the right track.