disambiguation bugs

My colleagues and I are having all sorts of odd problems with disambiguation -- not just in our own custom style (which has been validated in CSL 0.8), but also with Chicago author-date and other similar styles.

If you have, say, two Smith et al.'s -- Smith and two different groups of people -- proper disambiguation would make it "Smith, Jones et al. 2007" and "Smith, Myers et al. 2007" to disambiguate. But if there aren't competing Smith et al.'s it SHOULDN'T disambiguate like that, but it's doing that to us, spontaneously and erratically.

It also is inserting initials to disambiguate even when there's no competing reference, so it'll show up as J. Smith 2007 even without any other Smiths.

Any idea what's going on or how to stop this? It's been a problem with at least the last 2 or 3 beta releases.

We are using: Zotero 2.1b7 and Word 2007.
  • Now here's a new and interesting iteration of the bug:

    Lobell, D.B., Cahill, K.N. and Field, C.B. (2007a). “Historical effects of temperature and precipitation on California crop yields.” Climatic Change 81(2), 187-203. DOI: 10.1007/s10584-006-9141-3.

    Lobell, D.B., Cahill, K.N. and Field, C.B. (2006). “Weather-based yield forecasts developed for 12 California crops.” California Agriculture 60(4), 211-215.

    Schlenker, W. and Lobell, D.B. (2010b). “Robust negative impacts of climate change on African agriculture.” Environmental Research Letters 5(1), 014010. DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/5/1/014010.

    Schlenker, W. and Roberts, M.J. (2009). “Nonlinear temperature effects indicate severe damages to U.S. crop yields under climate change.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 106(37), 15594 -15598. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0906865106.

    By the way, I have downloaded the new Word plug-in, which I thought would stop this, but it didn't.
  • @marionsd: You're probably running across a processor bug that was recently fixed. Zotero 2.1b7 uses processor version 1.0.113. The next beta release will contain version 1.0.114 (or higher), which fixes a problem with disambiguation parameters "leaking" from one cite to another under some circumstances. The release annoucement (which basically just says that) is here. The simplest thing for you will be to wait for the next release, which should resolve the issue.
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