Style Error:American Sociological Association

kelley.sittner

I have run into two problems with the ASA style in Zotero.
1. According to the ASA Style Guide (3rd edition), when there are only two authors, there should not be a comma separating the authors in the reference list.
2. There are some problems if there are authors with the same last name in my reference list. First, in the in-text citations, the authors' first initials are included. Second, in the reference list, rather than including the first name and middle initial, only initial are shown. The correct format would exclude the initials from the in-text citation and include the first name and middle initial in the reference list.

Please, please fix them. I love Zotero but these two problems have caused me some serious anxiety as I am trying to finish my dissertation. Thanks!

adamsmith

I'll have a look at 1. Should be an easy fix.
2. is two separate issue - the initials in the bibliography will be fixed in the next Zotero release, you won't need to do anything.
On the initials for authors - what exactly are ASA's prescriptions here? How and when are authors with the same name distinguished?

kelley.sittner

There is nothing in the ASA styleguide that addresses authors with the same last name. But in journal articles that use ASA, only the last name is provided in the in-text citation, both for a source that has two authors with the same last name (e.g., Muthen and Muthen 2008) and for different sources that have authors with the same last name (e.g., Greenfeld and Smith 1999; Jang and Smith 1997). For the reference list, first names and middle initials are given regardless of whether there are multiple authors with the same last name.

Does that help? And thanks for getting to this so quickly!

adamsmith

right - as I said - the bibliography shouldn't have been affected at all, that's a bug that's already fixed in the development version and this will correct itself on the next update of Zotero.
For disambiguation that's helpful, too - clearly the current disambiguation is incorrect - I guess I'll change this to minimal disambiguation - i.e. initials will only be added when two citations are otherwise indistinguishable (i.e. (B. Smith 1776; A. Smith 1776).) The alternative to that would be to use year suffixes, so that this would read
(Smith 1776a, b) - if you find any indication one way or the other that'd be helpful, but the case is sufficiently rare to not be a major issue.

kelley.sittner

When I updated Zotero yesterday, some weird things happened to my reference list and in-text citations (using ASA format). There are some authors that are in multiple references, sometimes as first author, sometimes not. But for all of the citations that have those authors, letters are being added to the end of the year (e.g., Farrington, 2003a; Nagin, Farrington, and Moffit 1995e). Any thoughts on why this is happening?

Also, author initials are still appearing in the in-text citations and it isn't because of disambiguation. It occurs even when the years of publication are different or there are different co-authors (e.g., D.S. Nagin and Land 1993; D. S. Nagin, Farrington, and Moffit 1995; D. Nagin and Tremblay 1999). In this case, Nagin is the same person in all of the citations but he didn't use his middle initial for the last publication.

adamsmith

The disambiguation works as currently expected - I'll fix this eventually, but there are many styles who require all author names to disambiguate. I'll let you know when the fix is done.

The other issue (letters after years) I don't know anything about, except that people have been reporting it on and off since Zotero 2.1 - fbennett has been tracking this and will likely be able to give you a better answer, hopefully including a solution.