Bibliography problem

kmchang

I am having two problem with Word Bibliography. One of them might be style related.

I use Windows 7, 64-bit (same problem on Windows 7, 32-bit, however), recently upgraded to Word 2010, and Zotero 2.0.8.

1. I used to be able to edit my bibliography when I was writing the paper with Windows 2007. Now I simply can't do it anymore. I don't know if that has anything to do with my upgrade to Office 2010.

2. For some bibliography entries, the chronological order of certain references is never right. Please see the references under Chao, Yuen Ren, in the file that I will send over. This problem is there when Chicago Manual of Style (author-date) or Chicago Manual of Style (author-date) is selected. The selection of Harvard Reference format 1 (Author-Date) makes the order even worse. The selection of Journal of Pragmatics sets the order right, but too bad some details of this style do not meet the requirement of my publisher.

dstillman

Provide an example of the sorting here. Many of the people who might help you don't have access to your document.

kmchang

The problematic sorting of the references. Somehow it seems to list unpublished materials as a different category. Zetero cites both the 1923 book and the 1923 letter as (Chao 1923) in the body of the text, creating confusion.

Chao, Yuen Ren. 1923. Guoyin xinshiyun (New Poem Rhymes Based on the Pronunciations by the National Language). Shanghai: Commercial Press.
---. 1928. Xiandai wuyu de yanjiu (Studies in the Modern Wu-Dialects). Beijing: Tsing Hua xuexiao yanjiuyuan.
---. 1968. A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. Berkeley: University of California Press.
---Letter. 1921. The First Green Letter. April.
---Letter. 1923. The Second Green Letter. 15. April.
---Letter. 1925. To Bernhard Karlgren. 23. January. W46-294, Carton 5. Yuen Ren Chao Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
---Letter. 1926. To Bernhard Karlgren. 4. December. W46-294, Carton 5. Yuen Ren Chao Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

fbennett

The first thing to note is that the citation formatter for 2.0 is slated to be replaced by a new utility in Zotero 2.1 (now under development), and the 2.0 formatter is no longer supported. I'm happy to report that in the development version, the sort does come out in date order, with disambiguation. So we can say with some certainty that this problem will go away when Zotero 2.1 is released. A short-term solution for 2.0 is less certain, but I did some troubleshooting to at least get a handle on the issue.

I set up a sample document with data from the first two refs, plus the Second Green Letter ref. In both 2.0.3 and 2.0.8, the sort order comes out as in your sample, and disambiguation does not occur, as you say. This is under Linux and Open Office, so it's not specific to your version of Word; it's a subtle problem in the 2.0 citation formatting code itself.

This doesn't solve the problem, but it does show that the sorting issue here is not caused by the recent change to the sorting code; it's caused by something else (although the exact cause is still unknown).

One oddity that might be related (for others who might be looking at this issue) is that the formatter seems to be crashing on the letter cite. Without any other refs by the same author, I get this:

Chao, Yuen RenLetter. 1923. The Second Green Letter. April 15.

The style clearly requires trailing punctuation on the author, but it's not being supplied, which suggests some sort of processor crash in the Chicago contributors macro when it is invoked on personal communication items with this data combination.

fbennett

Well, how about that. I tried something lazy, and it worked. Try the version of the Chicago Author-Date style here, and see if it solves the problem:

http://gist.github.com/579085

The contributors macro contained a couple of nested macros, invoked unconditionally after the main names block. I just moved these into the bibliography section directly, and added them to the sort keys. Functionally this should be identical to the original code, but it's a bit simpler to parse because it avoids some nesting of macros. It works here. Your mileage may vary, but it's certainly worth a try.

To install the style, click on the link above, and then click on the "raw" link that you find in the page. Save the file to your desktop, and drag it into Firefox to install. Restart Firefox to bring up the style. I've cast it as a different style from the main Chicago Author-Date style, so you'll need to specially select it in Document Preferences.

Hope it works!

adamsmith

no need to restart Firefox, though - the style will update immediately - you might have to switch styles back in forth in your document, though.
Only translator updates require a restart.

fbennett

Ah. A followup note here ...

I just realized that this is not functionally equivalent for sorting. The original code wanted to bang the recipients result in behind the author/editor/translator block, so that it would serve as the primary key if those were missing. The revision will treat the authors as empty, so any letter items with only a recipient listed will come at one extreme end or other of the bibliography.

I've checked in the original fix; but if the change to sort behavior is undesired, the patch should be rejected -- the new processor seems to work okay with the existing structure, so there's less damage that way in the long run.

kmchang

Thanks so much. I will try the lazy method when I get back to my office computer. How about the inability to edit the bibliography attached to the end of the Word document? Any way to add a bracketed date to a reference? I used to be able to do that.

kmchang

The fix in the style http://gist.github.com/579085 unfortunately does not work. Again it puts the letters in a different category, sorting them separately from the publications. But the point is: Zotero still cites the 1923 book and 1923 letter both as (Chao 1923), confusing the readers.