Italics for in-text citation

hayjay

Hi

In my honours thesis, I am referencing websites that do not have an individual author as they are organisations. For instance: (Facebook 2010).

My supervisor suggested that names of companies in in-text citations should be italicised - i.e. (Facebook 2010).

Is there any way to set up Zotero to do this automatically for website references?

I am using Harvard author/date style; Zotero 2.0.

Thanks

Hayden

adamsmith

no - at least currently Zotero can't distinguish between a corporate author and a person in citations. In Zotero 2.1 you can use mark up like <i> </i> in Zotero fields (i.e. in this case in the author field) and it will convert to Rich Text (i.e. italics here) in the citation. THat's currently in beta.

hayjay

Thanks Adam.

I'll install the beta version and hope to God it doesn't do anything nasty to my work a week before deadline :)

arggem

Make sure you back up your data before trying the beta!

Rintze

Actually, the Citation Style Language should allow for this (although the solution is a bit more complex). If you enter "Facebook" as the "Website Title" of your "Web Page" Zotero item, you could modify the citation style's substitution logic: when an item doesn't have any authors, the value of the "container-title" field can be substituted (this CSL field maps to Zotero's "Website Title" field).

hayjay

Thanks for the suggestion, arggem.

Rintze, could you explain to me (or point me to somewhere which does) the process involved in modifying the 'citation style's substitution logic'? I understand what you're getting at - if a Webpage item doesn't have an author, Zotero pulls info from the Website Title field - but am not sure 1) how to make Zotero do this, and 2) how to make Zotero italicise this entry.

Thanks in advance.

Rintze

Assuming you're using the Harvard1 style that ships with Zotero, you could change:

<macro name="author-short">
<names variable="author">
<name form="short" and="symbol" delimiter=", " delimiter-precedes-last="never" initialize-with=". "/>
<substitute>
<names variable="editor"/>
<names variable="translator"/>
<text macro="anon"/>
</substitute>
</names>
</macro>
into
<macro name="author-short">
<names variable="author">
<name form="short" and="symbol" delimiter=", " delimiter-precedes-last="never" initialize-with=". "/>
<substitute>
<names variable="editor"/>
<names variable="translator"/>
<text variable="container-title" font-style="italic"/>
<text macro="anon"/>
</substitute>
</names>
</macro>

See also
http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/csl_syntax_summary#authors
and
http://www.zotero.org/support/csl_simple_edits

hayjay

Rintze,

I replaced the field as specified.

Unfortunately, this creates another problem. While the in-text references now display perfectly, the Bibliography is missing the author. For example:

(ACFID 2010)

Bibliography:
2010. "Total funds raised by Australian NGOs". ACFID. Available at: http:// (etc.)

As you can see, no "ACFID" at the beginning of the reference.

I imagine to remedy this requires a recoding to specify where the Bibliography grabs its data - but I am HTML ignorant.

Many thanks for your help thus far.

Rintze

The bibliography uses a different macro, for which you can add the same substitution rule. In the "author" macro, change
<substitute>
<names variable="editor"/>
<text macro="anon"/>
</substitute>
into
<substitute>
<names variable="editor"/>
<text variable="container-title" font-style="italic"/>
<text macro="anon"/>
</substitute>

hayjay

Perfect. Thank you. I owe you a beer.

Cheers
Hayden

hayjay

Just going through and amending my library now to place organisational website authors into the Webpage Title field.

I've encountered a small problem that I didn't anticipate.

In my thesis, I have referenced newspaper articles written by a news organisation which appear on a newspaper website.

For instance, an article written by AP that appears on nytimes.com.

Originally, I would put "Author" as "AP" and "Website Title" as "New York Times". Now that "AP" has shifted to "Website Title", "New York Times" is homeless. I've tried to put it in one of the other boxes (Short Title, Language, etc.) but Zotero only seems to source website bibliographical details from the Title, Author, Website title, Date, URL and Accessed fields.

Is there any way to instruct Zotero to grab bibliographic info from another box - say, "Website Type" - which I can then put the website name in?

Thanks
Hayden

noksagt

Why not list this as a newspaper type?

But, in any case:
http://gsl-nagoya-u.net/http/pub/csl-fields/webpage.html

hayjay

Thanks.

If I list it as a newspaper type (which is what they are currently) I'm back to my original problem - no italics for the organisation in question.

Rintze

Are you sure you have to include AP in the bibliographic entry? In the MLA style, this doesn't seem to be required:

http://www.noodletools.com/helpdesk/index.php?action=kb&article=62
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_do_you_cite_an_Associated_Press_article_appearing_in_a_newspaper_on_the_Works_Cited_page_of_a_research_paper

fbennett

@hayjay: At the risk of some criticism from colleagues in CSL for jumping the gun, I'll chime in here with an alternative possibility, drawn from ongoing CSL development. If you have an instance of Zotero 2.1 installed, you might give this style a try [click on the "raw" link to download the file, then drag the file into the Firefox window to install]]. It should apply italics to institutional authors (authors entered with single-field mode in Zotero), for all item types.

While this style is not valid against the current CSL 1.0 schema, it has a couple of advantages, in that sorting and presentation will (or at least should) work normally in the bibliography, and items with mixed authorship (i.e. an individual author sharing credit with their affilliated institution) will format correctly, with the institutional author set as an author, and in italics.

I should stress (as others no doubt will) that the CSL code in the style does not carry the CSL imprimatur, and as such is unsupported, and is subject to change without notice. I offer it up because if it works, it might simplify your prep for submission; but if you try it and run into problems, you should go with the good advice already given by Rintze and noksagt.

A doc describing the CSL code is available here, if you're interested (note that the link is to a Google Groups page, which will disappear when Google eliminates that part of the service early next year).

bdarcus

Can I jump in here with an alternative interpretation of the problem?

My supervisor suggested that names of companies in in-text citations should be italicised - i.e. (Facebook 2010).

The issue here is really not the organizational names: "Facebook" is the title, and all titles that substitute for author names will, I am guessing, be rendered the same way in such a style.

This is common with newspaper articles in a lot of styles, for example, where the article title substitutes for the missing author name. It's just that the base domain name homepage happens to have "Domain" as its title.

Do with it what you will ...

fbennett

@hayjay: What Bruce said. Reading more carefully, I see that my institutional authors suggestion is at cross purposes to (at least the better part of) your use case. Interested to hear what works for you in the end.

adamsmith

good point, Bruce.
Practically that means, hayjay, that if you (and your advisor) agree with Bruce, you'd leave the author field empty entirely - depending on your style, Zotero will automatically use the publication then and you might even find a style that uses italics right away - it's definitely doable that way.
That doesn't address your AP issue - but I actually don't think you should use AP as an author in those cases - afaik stories marked as AP in the NY Times aren't actually written by AP, they are just based entirely on AP coverage - AP isn't the author.

hayjay

Thanks everyone for your input - certainly adds complexity to the situation! I'll investigate further in the coming days and settle with an appropriate solution.
Thanks again.

Hans Trinklein

Hey - I have a different question, and as a techno-newbie, don't know how to start a different string for discussion. It is this:
I want to make my entire footnote a Zotero citation, with comments, etc. included as a prefix or a suffix. My comments for a particular footnote sometimes include Latin phrases (et al., inter alia, and so on) or an italicized word for emphasis.

Problem: the only way I know how to insert such italics is by using the "Show Editor" button as I add/edit my citation. But once I do that, Zotero won't update that citation anymore. So if I change something about the book referenced (in my Zotero master file) the change won't be reflected in my footnotes.

Question: is there any way to special-format prefix and suffix stuff in my Zotero citations without losing the update capabilities?

I'm running version 2.0.9 and using Chicago-Full-With-Bibliog style.

Thanks!

adamsmith

no, not at the moment - I think that in the 2.1 version using mark-up (such as <i> </i> etc.) in the prefix suffix field might do that for you, but someone would have to confirm.

Gracile

I think that in the 2.1 version using mark-up (such as etc.) in the prefix suffix field might do that for you, but someone would have to confirm.

I confirm this. You can use mark-up in zotero fields and in the word plugin (prefix, suffix). With Zotero 2.1b of course...
@Hans Trinklein: You'll find the mark-up that you have to use here.