Author-date without author or date

I'm using an author-date citation style (Linguistics Unified), and I'm trying to figure out if it's possible to insert a citation without an author or a date.

Here's the problem: I have a line of text that I want to phrase as something like:

This phenomenon was first reported by Pardoe in 1935, but it had already been in place by the nineteenth century.

This is the only time Pardoe 1935 is mentioned in the text, and since (I think) the only way it can appear in a Zotero bibliography is if there's a citation, I need to put a citation in there. However, as far as I can tell I can only suppress the author—but I need to suppress everything, since the author and the year are both mentioned in the text. As I recall, Endnote has this functionality; is there a simple way to do this using Zotero?

I'm using Zotero 2.0.9 with Zotero MacWord Integration 3.0b7 and Word for Mac 2008.

  • edited February 1, 2011
    "Edit Bibliography" should be among the buttons available in your word processor. Place the cursor in the bibliography, click on that button, and you should be able to add uncited references.

    [edit: the "Edit Bibliography" button works regardless of where the cursor is placed in the document -- see below.]
  • Right. But if you're working on a long document it's easy to forget that you need to add something. Yes, I know, I could put a sticky note on my desk—but that kind of defeats the purpose of having the program to do the remembering for me, you know?

    It isn't a huge deal for what I'm working on—it's not a terribly long document, and it's only one publication that creates this issue—but for something with a lengthy literature review, this could be painful.

    (From searching before I posted my original post, I know the idea of a "suppress date" checkbox has been floated here and there before—so I'm curious whether there's a technical reason that hasn't come about, or if it's more of a resources issue.)
  • It seems to me that this use case can be addressed with a few relatively small changes to the current interface.

    First, I misspoke above: I see that the "Edit Bibliography" button works regardless of where the cursor is placed in the document. So you don't need to interrupt your workflow by scrolling about in the document.

    Second, when uncited items are added to the list of references with "Edit Bibliography", they are persistent. Even if the bibliography section is deleted in the word processor, when it is added back with the "Add Bibliography" button, it will include the uncited references. So you don't need to keep a separate note.

    Currently, you do need to have a bibliography placed in the document in order to add or remove entries from the list of references. In principle, this shouldn't be necessary. There are a few glitches in the interaction between Zotero and the citeproc-js processor in Zotero 2.1beta, but when these wrinkles are ironed out, you should be able to just click on "Edit Bibliography" at any time and add or remove uncited reference items. Treating these as citations would be a little odd, since there would be no visible handle in the document (no citation in the text) through which to manage them.
  • I am confused by your sentence. It isn't clear that you are citing a Pardoe publication from 1935 as your source. It could be that your information about Pardoe came from some other source. Further, if Pardoe first reported the phenomenon in 1935, what is the source of your information that "it had already been in place by the nineteenth century"? (By the way, this suggests that it could have been in place at the start of the 19th centurary.)

    Is this the only reference to an author named Pardoe and his or her only publication? If not, a reader could become really puzzled about the sources. I can see that you may want the stylistic flexibility of suppressing both an author and the publication date. However, without an indicator such as the year within round brackets; how would an academic reader recognize that your statement is supported by a reference?
  • And to answer the question about "hide year" - I think a principle reason to not add that is a concern for cluttering the interface, with very limited additional functionality
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