Consolidate Authors

aatawfik · February 3, 2011

As my library has expanded, I have noticed that the same author is being cited in different ways. I went through and manually changed the authors so that it showed up the same, but I am still having the same problem.

I am proposing that a feature be there where you could view all the authors and then drag and drop for something to replace. For instance, if you were to drag "Jim Johnson" over "J. Johnson", it would read as Jim Johnson.

I apologized if this has been posted before. I tried to do a couple searches, but couldn't find anything.

ajlyon · February 3, 2011

Author management is something that needs work, but there are no good ways to deal with it so far. One enterprising person created a version of Zotero that adds a new panel that lists all the authors, which is a nice start. Hopefully they will release that for wider use.

Author management with expanded options would make a great Zotero plugin; I've dreamed about writing one myself for months, but nothing's come of it yet.

aatawfik · March 21, 2011

I initially moved this in the feature request, but have since moved it to the troubleshooting. Here is my problem...

I will cite one author as 'law precedents (Jonassen, 2011)'

I will cite the same author later from a different article, but it will show as (D. Jonassen, 1997)

Does anyone know a workaround? I went ahead and manually went in to make sure every author field was the same (full name of the author) and eliminated any partial or variations for the same author. However, I am still having a problem. This was fine for my shorter papers, but my professor is saying I need to reeval my APA formatting in my dissertation.

adamsmith · March 21, 2011

this is highly unlikely - Zotero will not disambiguate if authors are actually the same - try in a fresh document with just the citations in question. Remember the initial would also be triggered if you have, somewhere in your paper, an A. Jonassen, even if s/he is the 10th author, hidden by an et al.

In 2.1, Zotero allows for less aggressive disambiguation - I'm not clear what APA requires, but it could be that it should be set to "primary-names" rather than "all names"
http://citationstyles.org/downloads/specification.html#disambiguation
I'll try to see if I can find something in APA