Omitting the author from the reference when author and publisher are the same

ivorakovac

Hello,

I have developed a CSL style compliant with our particular in house citation formatting requirements. However, we have a rather (at least I think so) unusual requirement to omit the author when author and publisher are the same.

Examples of generated bibliography would be:
1) Book with different author and publisher:
Jordan P. Schistosomiasis – The St Lucia project, 2nd ed. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985.
2) Book with identical author and publisher:
The European health report 2005. Public health action for healthier children and populations. Copenhagen, WHO Regional Office for Europe, 2006 (http://www.euro.who.int/document/e87325.pdf, accessed 22 February 2012).

However, as far I can see there is no way to test if the content of two fields is the same by using the choose (or any other) command, one can only test if a variable contains non-empty value, but not test the actual content of a variable.

Currently, I am deleting the author from the bibliography, but this is not really nice, as it is simply wrong and limits the usability of database with other citation styles. Another approach would be to edit the bibliography manually before publishing.

Any suggestions on how to omit the author from the generated reference when author and publisher are the same would be very much appreciated.

Many thanks,
Best
Ivo

adamsmith

Sorry, I don't think there's a better way to do that.

ivorakovac

Many thanks, any chances that this functionality (something like choose if variable1=variable2 or choose if variable1=”some constant”) will be supported in future versions of CSL?

adamsmith

Very unlikely. fbennett has some pretty advanced features concerning institutional authors in his version of Zotero ( http://gsl-nagoya-u.net/http/pub/zotero-multilingual-overview.html ) that might allow you to create citations like you the ones you need relatively reliably, but I don't know much about that and it's designed to deal with law-citation specific issues such as the need to abbreviate insitutional authors.
Those features might make it into Zotero at a later point.

fbennett

As adamsmith says, the processor has some extended capabilities for handling institutional names. The processor will recognize the publisher variable as a name, in fact, but unfortunately that will not cover your use case.

The one situation where the value of two names variables can be compared is where they are immediately adjacent to one another in the rendered output. In the case, they appear in different locations, so that's out.

If getting correct output automatically is a priority, another approach might be to additionally register the publisher name in the CSL "authority" variable for these items. That's possible, although not officially supported.