Urban Studies style, author first name sometimes incl in text cites

cdias

I'm using the Urban Studies style with the Word plugin and I notice that sometimes for in-text citations, the author's first name or initial is included. For example:

Zotero is a bibliographic citation tool (G. Smith, 2009)

instead of:

Zotero is a bibliographic citation tool (Smith, 2009).

Why does this happen? Is there something I can do to ensure that the first name is always excluded?

Thanks.

adamsmith

http://www.zotero.org/support/kb/given_name_disambiguation

cdias

Thanks for the quick reply - I think this is exactly what's happening!

bdarcus

Let us know if you come across any actual problems with the style. I created it on pretty short notice for a pub of mine that's subsequently come out. It worked fine for me, but YMMV.

cdias

The only other problem I've had with this style is that after the properly capitalizing the first word in a title, it makes everything lower case including country names. For example,

Comparative design in the u.s. and europe: what does it tell us?

Btw, thanks for creating the style!

bdarcus

I believe that titling issue is a problem with Zotero not understanding proper nouns. It's not the most straightforward problem to solve though.

So the short-term solution is don't worry about it until you're done with the manuscript, at which point you can save a copy of the file, unlink the fields (search for how to do this), and manually edit those few entries.

adamsmith

But hasn't is become pretty much consensus around here not to use the "sentence-case" option in styles precisely because of that?

bdarcus

I dunno; has it? I have no opinion myself.

cdias

Good to know that the workaround is manual intervention. Prior to this year, I was using the ASA style and I suspect I didn't notice this because I just used the default that probably did not use sentence-case.

adamsmith

most of us who currently write styles currently (noksagt, Rintze, me at least) recommend (and practice) saving all of your items in sentence case (if necessary correct after import). Zotero does very well converting to title case, so styles that require title case can use that options, while styles with sentence case work without any transformation.

The manual fix at the end is, imho, a second best alternative.

Rintze

Storing titles in Sentence case has the advantage that you only have to correct errors once. Also, Sentence case will always be less lossy and more reliable as a starting point for case conversions than Title Case.

cdias

Rintze, I'm clearly missing something: could you explain why errors would have to be corrected only once with sentence case?

adamsmith

because you correct them in the Zotero database, not in the document. So once corrected they´d be fixed for all future use.