Organizational Authors

marsh

Hi,

I have been using LyZ, a very excellent plug-in that inserts citations into LyX. The latter is a WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean) front end to LaTeX, and it handles citations using BibTeX.

Some time ago I posted the following on the LyZ forum:

If a web site or report is authored by an organization, LyX/LaTeX breaks the organization name into a “first” and “last” name. The way to avoid this is to use double curly brackets in the BibTeX database, but LyZ is only putting single brackets. For example, we want {{National Bureau of Economic Research}} but LyZ is putting {National Bureau of Economic Research}. As a result, without editing the .bib file, the References will have an entry: “of Economic Research, National Bureau.”

Petr (the great and author of LyZ) wrote me back and said:

I have tried putting the organization name into the single field and manually enclosing it with brackets, which seems to work fine (only LyX displays it incorrectly, splitting the name), but this might be limiting if you also use Zotero with Word or OOo plugins.
I am not sure how to distinguish organization from an author.
In fact all the export to bibtex is identical with Zotero’s, except for the citekeys, so this issue would be better dealt with in Zotero code.
The only solution I can see would be to add another type of creator in Zotero (such as Organization), which would be handled during export to Bibtex by double brackets.
Someone must have had this issue with Zotero already, have you found some discussion about it? I try to look, later today, someone must have had this problem.
Petr

So I'm wondering. Is there some way around this problem within the limits of the current version of Zotero? If not, how do I request that Zotero start distinguishing between different kinds of authors?

I've seen some related things discussed before. To my mind, the simplest solution might be to leave the author's first name blank and put the whole organization into the last name field. However, Zotero would have to convey this information to plug-ins like LyZ.

dstillman

The only solution I can see would be to add another type of creator in Zotero (such as Organization)

There's a ticket for this. Not sure when it will happen.

I'm not sure if this has any bearing on the new CSL processor or whether this is an issue only for BibTeX.

fbennett

This may give rise to some discussion, but the new processor handles institutional authors as ordinary "author", identifying them as literal names (one-field entry in Zotero) as opposed to structured names (two-field entry in Zotero). The literal field is treated as a comma-delimited list of institutional subunits (subcommittee, committee, organization).

(EDIT: After reading the ticket, I see that Zotero stores single-field entries in the last name field. Lone last names might be mapped to the "literal" key expected by the processor, to get common cases working.)

Handling these names as "author" allows the correct formatting of items with a mixture of institutional and individual authors, with some individuals associated with an institution, and perhaps some contributing in their individual capacity. There is an example of an affiliated author in the processor demo page (search for Malone).

The current convention adopted by the processor is to treat individual authors as affiliated to an institution that follows them, with unaffiliated authors placed at the end, after the last institutional author. This is the reverse of the data input sequence laid out in the zotero-legal group.

The proposal linked above otherwise reflects the way things are implemented in the processor, but the schema extension described there is out of bounds for CSL 1.0, and will not validate. To get the basics in place (getting the joins right between the various elements of a mixed-authorship work, properly truncating the middle subunits of an institutional chain of authority), the processor patches standard CSL 1.0 styles on the fly with a template node conforming to the proposal. The added machinery does not interfere with the formatting of ordinary name combinations that are currently handled correctly. Examples of how the schema extension would work if fully implemented are in the test suite, as the fixtures in the experimental "institutions" set:
FirstAndLast;
MixedPeopleAndOrganizationsAlwaysUseFirst;
MixedPeopleAndOrganizationsInTextImplicitChop;
MixedPeopleAndOrganizationsMaybeUseFirst; and
SimpleShortLong.

This is not directly relevant to the BibTeX issue, but I thought I would mention it, while the topic of institutional authors is on the table.