Institutional Author Acronym in in-text citation

http://www.linkedin.

I an citing several institutional authors but the names are 4-6 words each. I'd like to use abbreviations for in-text citations (e.g., USDOE, 1999; OECD, 2004; UNEP, 2007) but list the full names followed by abbreviation in the bibliography (e.g., U.S. Department of Energy (USDOE)). Is there any want I can do this easily?

I tried searching the forums but didn't see anything.

Thanks.

adamsmith

Not easily, no. When I use reports from IOs, I list the abbreviation as the author and the longform as the publisher/institution.
(I generally want the entries in the right alphabetical order in the bibl. - If someone looks for OECD 2004 in the Bibl., it's supposed to be between Odessa and Ofrey, not between Opal and Ossendor.)

marsh

I don't have the latest edition of the Chicago Manual of Style in the office where I'm working today, but Sections 16.53-16.54 of the 14th edition has useful suggestions.

Basically, the suggestion is to include the acronym as part of the institutional author's name, either before or after it. To wit:

U.S. Department of Energy (USDOE). 1999. Common Baby Light My Fire. Washington, DC.: U.S. Department of Energy.

OR

USDOE (U.S. Department of Energy). 1999. Common Baby Light My Fire. Washington, DC.: U.S. Department of Energy.

Neither of these will work exactly as you want because Zotero will put the whole name in the citation. You might, however, use the institutional name as a first name and perhaps tolerate or find a way to remove the comma separating last name from first.

Some times you may not want to use the acronym, in which case there's a problem. A nice feature would allow this as an option, but of course that makes things more complex.

Another possible solution is to have two references, one with the actual name, and the other with just an author and title. (Make sure it's a reference type that does not italicize titles, unless you like it that way.) Use the acronym for the author and "See <full name>" as the title. Then, somewhere in your document, insert an actual reference to the full name reference but hide it. (Easy to do in Word.) Your mileage may vary with this option.

fbennett

As a side-note on the development front, the citeproc-js processor has built-in institution name support that can do all of this. It's been disabled for the time being in official Zotero, and depends on development extensions to the CSL formatting language that are documented here, but it's been tested and is known to work. Acronyms are provided by an external abbreviations plugin that allows these and other abbreviations associated with a style to be controlled by the user.

So there's a solution brewing out there.

JoshCraig

Just curious, is this feature available in the new version of Zotero just released?

fbennett

Not as far as I know.

adamsmith

Frank - I thought the gadget hooked into the current citeproc? Why wouldn't it work with Zotero 3.0?

fbennett

The code is all contained in the processor, but a hint needs to be included in the names input to flag a name as belonging to an institution. In MLZ, all single-field entry names receive an "isInstitution" flag on the names element, which alters the way joins work, and allows formatting to be controlled by a (new, still unapproved) cs:institution element that is an optional sibling to follow cs:name. The cs:institution node allows you to print the full or short form of the name (as converted via an external abbreviations list), or both, with different formatting for every combination. You can basically do anything with the format that you like.

When 2.1 was first deployed, we found that some users had been entering names in the literal form expected for a particular style or language in single-field mode in order to "force" things, and were alarmed when the joins behavior changed on them. There was also a crashing bug in the names code that was triggered by one possible combination of personal and institutional names (I forget the details).

The core team judged that single-field mode was not meant to apply only to institutions (as had been demonstrated by complaints), and turned off the "isInstitution" toggle pending further consideration of the UI for institutional authors. So current Zotero follows 2.1 in treating all authors as individuals.

Bugs in the names code have all been fixed, and the code is running happily in MLZ (where I've replaced the single/double field icon with person/institution). So it should deploy smoothly the next time around, once the UI issues are sorted out.

adamsmith

Right - I understand the Institution issue. How about the gadget in general? Could we start looking at deploying it for journal abbreviations? What would need to be done?

fbennett

I haven't tested it against the latest version of 3.0, but it's meant to work -- it speaks to the processor directly, and Z3.0 provides an interface to the processor.

The user interface could use a little spit and polish, but if it's not broken, it's definitely useable. Abbreviation lists can be exported and merged, and are tied to each style, so if there were a circle of persons working in the same style, you could start building a set of abbreviations for download.

naught101

Cross referencing similar topic: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/19115/institutional-author-acronym-in-intext-citation/

Oh, for a decent zotero bug tracker.

adamsmith

Zotero has a bug tracker https://github.com/zotero/zotero/issues?sort=created&direction=desc&state=open&page=1 , but I don't know what you're referring to here - this clearly isn't a bug in any common sense of the word.
Note Franks reference to his abbreviations plugin above - that's probably the way to go any time soon.

edit: also, you're not cross-referencing. Your link goes to the same thread.

naught101

Bah, I meant this http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/12676/shortlong-name-for-institutional-author/

Most bug trackers take feature requests, which I was kind of thinking of this thread as. Thanks for the link Adam.

adamsmith

yeah - Zotero doesn't do that on purpose.
Generally the issue tracker takes (and has) planned features, but the idea is to keep them limited to issues where devs agree that they should be implemented and where the mode of implementation is more or less agreed on.
Anything beyond that takes a huge amount of work to administer effectively and Zotero doesn't have capacity for that.

cdhender1024

I realize this is a very old thread but the author addresses the exact issue I am having. Has Zotero implemented the ability to do what the OP is describing? I would appreciate any insight.

Thanks