Sorting error Insitutional Author

iris

(duplicate of my comment here, but I think this may be a real error, so it doesn't really fit the feature request forum)

What is the proper way to enter institutional authors?

I'm citing a report by the Los Angeles Police Department, and when I enter that name into the single-field author input, Zotero seems to think that it's a last name with 'Los" as a non-dropping particle, and therefore in APA style sorts it under 'A':

Adelberg, S., & Batson, C. D. (1978). Accountability and helping: When needs exceed resources. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(4), 343.

Los Angeles Police Department. (2010). LAPD: Crime Mapping.

Argyris, C. (1976). Single-loop and double-loop models in research on decision making. Administrative Science Quarterly, 21(3), 363-375.

When I enter "Los Angeles Police Department" in the last-name field of the two field input, and leave the first-name field empty, the exact same thing happens. I can only get the bibliography to look as it should by putting "Los Angeles Police Department" into the first-name field and leaving the last-name field empty, but surely that can't be right.

Other institutional authors (in the single-field input) are displaying fine. What am I doing wrong? Does Zotero get confused by 'Los' at the start of this insitutional author?

Using Zotero 2.1.8 with the APA style 6th ed from 6/7/2011; and WinWord plugin 3.1.1 but the same thing happens when I create a bibliography directly in Zotero.

fbennett

This is caused by the processor. For an immediate solution, put straight double-quotes around the name. I'll look at adjusting the next processor release to prevent this from happening, but I can't promise the fix, or that it will be permanent, since it might interfere with other use cases.

iris

Thanks!

fbennett

I've done a little testing, and I think I'll leave things in their current state. Zotero will not treat "Los" as a name particle in current Zotero if the name is enclosed in straight double quotes, so there is at least a way to control for this.

The processor can be made to handle the name as a proper institutional name (which has other effects, not relevant in this case) if a flag is set on the input. This is a new feature, and it may be some time before it is supported by Zotero, but it's probably better to hold with quoted fields where needed, rather than running the risk of confusion by adjusting the processor to guess at whether an institution name is intended.

ajlyon

It's not the case that articles should never be ignored in institutional names -- we wouldn't want "The University of Ohio" to sort under "The". Los Angeles is confusing because the article isn't an article in English, but the article list is multilingual.

fbennett

Revisiting this thread following a second report concerning the same issue.

https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/29420/bug-sorting-bibliography-with-single-field-authors/

The processor code may have changed since this earlier report, but currently this sorts as "Angeles" because the "Los" is being mistaken for a name particle. I have adjusted the code to avoid that for all family names not accompanied by a given name. It's a partial fix -- the better method would be to flag these explicitly as institutional names, in which case the processor would do the right thing in this and several other respects. But this should be enough for most contexts.

fbennett

An updated version of the processor is now available which should fix this. You can try it by installing the processor patch plugin. All the plugin does is to swap in the latest version of the citation processor. You can remove it when the next Zotero release comes out.