Doubled dates in bib entry for an online encyclopedia

edited 20 days ago
Hi, I'm citing an entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is entirely online. I'm using the CMS author-date format, and the item type is Web Page. Here's the bibliography entry Zotero is producing:

Graham, Daniel W. 2023. “Heraclitus.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2023. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2023/entries/heraclitus/.

As you can see, the year is appearing in the bibliography after both the name and the source title. Any suggestions?
  • That's on purpose -- the full date is supposed to be included after the publication title. Zotero/CSL can't detect whether you have month/date information, so if you just have the year, it duplicates that. I'd recommend adding at a minimum December to the date field.
  • OK, I changed the date field from "2023" to "Winter 2023" (the edition date) and now the output has the year alone after the name, and "Winter 2023" after the encyclopedia title. The odd thing is that I don't see such a requirement in the CMS itself, nor does it require an access date, although its guidance for its author-date system isn't as thorough as one might like. (Personally I'd prefer to suppress the second date, since the URL is to an archived version of the article.)

    Incidentally, would it make better sense to give this entry the Encyclopedia Article item type?
  • I haven't checked what they do in the 18th edition, but in the 17th edition it's in 15.50:
    "For sources that include a date of publication or revision, use the year of publication in the reference list entry. Repeat the year with the month and day to avoid any confusion."

    The example is
    Google. 2016. “Privacy Policy.” Privacy & Terms. Last modified March 25, 2016. http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/.

    I'd handle this as an online book chapter, which is also how Zotero imports it from your browser:

    Graham, Daniel W. 2023. “Heraclitus.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, Winter 2023. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2023/entries/heraclitus/.
  • That explains it -- I have the 16th edition.

    Thanks for the suggestion on the best item type.
  • Yes, this changed from 16 to 17. I think we have the 16th author date, too, if you prefer
  • No need, if the publisher wants me to use the 16th edition they'll let me know.
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