Abbreviated Citations

leah.germer@ecologic

Because I have to cite the rather long titles of various institutions, I would like to use an abbreviated form of the citation in the text (using Chicago Author-Date Format for example), but keep the long version in the bibliography.

For example, I would like the full title ''Bund der Steuerzahler'' to appear in my bibliography, but the abbreviated version ''BdSt'' to appear in my in text citations. Is there any way to set this up?

It also looks like Zotero is automatically abbreviating all of the authors' first names in my bibliography. Is there any way to turn this off?

Thank you!

adamsmith

No, there is no way to cite a short author (for what it's worth, I think most style guides would frown on that).
Whether first names are abbreviated in the bibliography or not depends on the style - among the author-date styles, e.g. Chicago and APSA don't abbreviate first names, APA and Harvard 1 do.

edit: For the first issue - the way I deal with that is to use the abbreviation in both bib and citation, and have the full name of the organization in the publisher field, e.g.

(ILO 2006)
ILO. 2006. 2006 Labour Overview: Latin America and the Caribbean. Lima: International Labour Organization.

fbennett

The Abbreviations Gadget that went up on the CitationStylist site a short while ago should permit short forms for institutional names. As the release announcement says, the plugin only works with Multilingual Zotero (MLZ) at present. This particular use case also requires support for institutional authors, which is disabled in official Zotero to avoid problems with legacy data. But the plugin is functional with MLZ, and gives a flavor of how this can work.