Can the Zotero Word Plugin insert citations in different forms like in Mendeley or Endnote?

pureimagination
Is it possible to display citations not just as "(Author, Year) old just "(Year") but as e.g.

Author (Year)
(Author)
(Short-Title, Year)

or else?

  • adamsmith
    Not currently no. It can only do (Author, Year) and (Year).

    Obviously it's possible to create citation styles that generate (Author), or Author (Year) or Short-title, Year, but I assume that's not what you're referring to.
  • pureimagination
    Ok, are there plans to implement this?

    My plan right now is to implement this in my own citation style via some conditions (e.g. if some specific locator is used, the citation should be displayed as "Author (Year)"). but this would cause that no other style could be selected afterwards. Therefore a built in version would be much nicer.
  • dstillman
    edited October 19, 2024
    To be clear, if you're just referring to narrative citations ("According to Smith (1776)"), Zotero can do that — just customize the citation and use Omit Author. See "Narrative Citations with Omit Author”.

    I don't know what EndNote has, but I don't think Mendeley has any functionality here that Zotero doesn't have — I think they just have "Suppress Author" (as Zotero originally called "Omit Author", when the Mendeley plugin was based on Zotero's).

    We're planning to support author-only citations in the future and make it easier to create narrative citations (e.g., without having to retype the author name outside of the parentheses).
  • pureimagination
    edited October 20, 2024
    In Mendeley you can select four different possibilities to entry a citation (see image below). I think 8 possibilities would be perfect for everyone's needs. There should be also:

    a) Author with brackets
    As discovered in 2002 … (Smith)

    b) Year with no brackets
    See above.

    c) Locator with brackets
    Smith discovered in 2002 that … (p. 65)

    d) Locator without brackets
    Smith (2002, chapter 4) mentioned that … However, he contradicts himself in chapter 8 by stating that …


    But the "Autor (Year)" is the most important one. Type them manually is an unnecessary effort and not dynamic if one changes the citation style.

    A problem I mentioned in Mendeley is that if one switches to a numeric style, the function "Author (Year)" doesn't work anymore and there will be an error message because there is no variable to render. This should be considered when implementing this function.

    In endnote one can easily edit the citation style for this function by adding the variable author. I think csl doesn't offer a function for this case so there should be a function in Zotero which gets the variable author from the metadata. Although this wouldn't be perfect because the author syntax wouldn't match to the defined syntax for the bibliography in csl. So longterm It would be nice to implement this in csl as well.


    https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u14793917/go6ch9ebwp8avubl0hua.png
  • pureimagination
    edited October 19, 2024
    If I select IEEE it's displayed as:

    https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u14793917/bmwuapfh78116bqipf6s.png
  • dstillman
    Your first screenshot didn't come through for some reason, but I guess they added these somewhat recently — those options aren't even shown in their Mendeley Cite documentation. These are flags that are supported by citeproc-js, so just offering them as toggles is easy, but as you point out, the hard part is actually supporting them well, including doing intelligent things when switching styles.

    There are some very complicated issues here, but we're planning to address this in a future version of the citation dialog.
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