Inconsistent initials/first names and page numbers in citations

z8080

I know this issue has been discussed before, but I am not aware of any solution for it. I am using the "Harvard Reference Format 1" citation style, and even though all papers by a certain author have that author's name consistently formatted (after I have manually edited all occurrences to make them consistent!...), my in-text citations are not consistent with regard to how authors' names are displayed, e.g. somtimes I have (J. Smith, 2010), (John Smith, 2011) and (Smith, 2012) all appearing at different points in my document.

I know that Zotero 3.0.8 will bring batch processing of library items, which will probably make it easier to edit all occurrences of an author's name so that it is displayed in a consistent way, even if the different translators have led to inconsistent name fields. But until then, is there a way at least for my references to appear with just the initial?

Also, again probably depending on the trnaslator, some papers include page numbers as metadata, while others don't, which leads to the Bibliography looking inconsistent. Assuming I don't want to manually complete all missing page fields (or delete all existing ones), what can I do to make this information be consistent in my bibliography as well?

Many thanks for any help!

adamsmith

Zotero 3.0.8 won't have batch editing. We have always said the next _major_ version, i.e. 3.5 or 4 (depending on what devs decide to call it).

You could use a style such as Chicago author-date that will only use disambiguation where it's strictly necessary or you could use APA which will always use initials.

I don't see what to do about page numbers - if they're required in a citation style they're required. If you don't have them in Zotero you'll have to manually add them. It's really a bad idea not to clean-up your Zotero data (that applies to authors, too - you may very well run into different issues wrt bibliography sorting etc. if you don't clean-up author first names).
Sure, it's possible to code a citation style that doesn't print page numbers - since no publication I'm aware of actually wants that, though, I have no interest in doing it, but see here:
http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/style_editing_step-by-step

z8080

Thanks Adam! My question was also about how to do that clean-up automatically or at least not 100% manually - with hundreds of items in my library, we're talking hours and hours of work that I'm sure can somehow be automatised - are you saying this will only be possible in the next major version?

I think the items that have missing page numbers have probably been created after retrieving meta-data from a local PDF file, rather than being imported through a proper translator such as ScienceDirect. Is there at least a way to see at a glance which papers have missing page numbers, so that I don't have to browse each item's Info fields one by one?

adamsmith

we're talking hours and hours of work that I'm sure can somehow be automatised - are you saying this will only be possible in the next major version?

yes.

Is there at least a way to see at a glance which papers have missing page numbers, so that I don't have to browse each item's Info fields one by one?

it's a bit of a hack, but do an advanced search for Pages --> does not contain -->0
and then add all other digits 1-9 to the conditions. Then create a saved search

z8080

Thanks! Turns out 1 in 5 of my papers have missing page numbers, I don't know how this happened - I guess the websites I'm using to import papers (mostly Google Scholar and ScienceDirect) often have this information missing

jrsnape

Just want to add how useful I would find the facility that longtalker is describing - some way to look at all instances of one author surname and disambiguate at least semi-automatically would be really useful. Thanks to adam for responding and letting us know when it might be possible. I've been looking for an answer to this on the web for a while.