Issue with BibLaTex author format

srcorsi

Hello Zotero forum. When I export the following citation with "author = {State of Ohio Environmental Protection Agency}" and read from another application (R Quarto), it assumes that "State of" is the first name, and places it after the rest of the agency name rather than keeping it as what I have in the original author field (the agency name is in the "last name" field and the "first name" field is not populated.) Here is the BibLaTex export from Zotero:

@report{state_of_ohio_environmental_protection_agency_biological_1996,
title = {Biological and Water Quality Study of Mill Creek - 1995},
url = {http://www.epa.ohio.gov/dsw/document_index/psdindx.aspx},
pages = {24},
number = {{MAS}/1996- 9-5},
author = {State of Ohio Environmental Protection Agency},
urldate = {2011-12-09},
date = {1996-07-30},
}

With this format, the citation renders to this from R Quarto:

Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, State of. 1996. “Biological and Water Quality Study of Mill Creek - 1995.” MAS/1996- 9-5.

when it should look like this:

State of Ohio Environmental Protection Agency. 1996. “Biological and Water Quality Study of Mill Creek - 1995.” MAS/1996- 9-5.

The response in the Quarto forum for this problem indicated that the author field should include double brackets like this:

author = {{State of Ohio Environmental Protection Agency}},

I manually changed the BibLaTex file to include the double brackets and it all works fine now. Is this something that should be modified in the Zotero export or is this some other specific problem to the other application perhaps?

Thanks!

adamsmith

I think the BBT add-on is more vigorous with double brackets, so that'd fix this for you. Note that you can also use CSL JSON with quarto, which avoids loss due to format conversion (since quarto uses the same CSL styles Zotero does)

srcorsi

Thanks for the feedback. Unfortunately, our organization won't allow me to use add-ons in Zotero (something to do with security). I tried the CSL JSON, and it does work well. The main downside to that method is that the CSL JSON ID that is used to reference the citation in the .qmd file doesn't have any info that looks like the actual citation. It works, but just appears a bit garbled within the .qmd file. Using the .bib option looks a bit nicer in the .qmd file...
Anyway, thanks again for your help with this. Much appreciated!

bwiernik

I would really recommend using CSL-JSON over .bib. Item types other than journal articles will generally produce incorrect citations with .bib.

You can manually set the citation key used for an item in CSL JSON by putting it in Extra like this:
Citation key: smith2000


(BBT doesn't make any network calls, so I would really recommend asking again to your organization to allow its use with Zotero [or even for it to be pre-installed with Zotero]. BBT removes a lot of pain with using Zotero in plain text writing.)

srcorsi

Thanks for the input--good info on the citation key. That method works brilliantly!

I will attempt to get them to allow the add-on, but my last attempt to get them to approve an add-on so I can use Zotero from MS Word took about 3 months and they ultimately denied my request. Crazy frustrating as I have been using that feature for maybe a decade or so...

adamsmith

Not to rub it in (I very much the institutional limits of IT policy and frustrations that go along with it) but one of the things that BBT does for you is writing a customizable, stable citation key to the Extra field ('pin the citekey' in the add-ons lingo)

srcorsi

Yes, that would be a nice feature for sure. Well, I have gotten through adding a Citation key at least for the current manuscript. It is nice to assure that it's something that easily makes sense in the Quarto code.