only chicaco manual of styles work, nothing else. Control of firstname format?

uaniko

I have two questions concerning citation style:

1: How can I use other styles than the chicago manual? I am using word 2010, new document, firefox 16.0.2 and the latest plugin for office. in firefox, in the zotero preferences under "Cite" and "Styles" many styles are present, like Cell and Nature, and all of them have a green tick. In word, when i go to preferences of the zotero plug-in, then the same list of styles apprears, however, i can only use "chicago manual of style (full note)" and "chicago manual of style (note)" and NONE of the others. if i try to select another style, like Nature, i get an error message: "Zotero experienced an error updating your document. [Exception... Component refurned failure code: 0x80004005 NS_ERROR_FAILURE ..........]"
why is that?

2. my other question is: How can i get control of how the authors of my citations are listed? Now, with the chicago manual of style (full note) i have some citations where all authors are listed, some where only the first author is listed and then "et al." and in some citations the firstname is written out fully and in some it is abbreviated with initials etc. I need to have it the SAME way in all citations! I did not find any way to control this in the preferences.

I appreciate your help!
many thanks in advance!

report error id: 1025678730

uaniko

some additional info:
I am using zotero 3.0.8, word-plugin 3.1.8 in office2010 under windows7. I googled and searched this forum and nobody seems to have this problem which I find very strange...
as I said: the chicago manual of style works, however is treating first names totally inconsistently. When I select other styles, I get the error message above. I also tried to download new styles from the repository, they were added apparently fine, they also appeared in my style list in the word plugin, but then again, when I try to change to any of the new styles, it again gives the same error message and all of my citations disappear... :-(

adamsmith

Simon would have to say about the Word plugin error -
see if you can switch to/use different styles in a new document, though.

The CMoS style uses full first names. If it doesn't do that in your case, that means that your citation data in Zotero doesn't have full first names (that happens e.g. when you import from google scholar). You have to manually fix that.

The et-al rules conform to the Chicago manual, i.e. we print only the first author followed by et al. for citations with more than three authors.

uaniko

Thank you, ok now I understand why the citations appear as they do with the "Chicago Manual of style (full note)". But I absolutely need to use a different stlye, like Nature e.g. where the first names are abbreviated. But I still cannot select any other style. I also tried a new document but no other style works.
I reinstalled and restarted everything already couple of times, but the problem remains stubbornly. Can it be that it is a windows 7 64-bit problem somehow?
What can I do?

adamsmith

Next thing to try would be "Reset Styles" in the advanced tab of the Zotero preferences. I'll be out for the rest of today, so if that doesn't work someone else would have to take over.

uaniko

I reset styles, as you suggested. Restarted word. Now my styles that I had previously downloaded from the repository have disappeared from the styles list. However, I am still only able to use CMoS and not anything else...

DWL-SDCA

Please try again using a completely new document. When you insert a reference, it should be one that you didn't use with your original document. Try disabling other (non-Zotero) FireFox plug-ins and restarting FireFox. If that doesn't help, try restarting your computer.

What anti-virus -malware protection are you using? Try temporarily disabling it. If you are using Microsoft's own Windows Security Essentials you will probably need to look for other causes. That software plays well with Zotero (and is well-respected by reviewers).

It will be a lot of trouble but if none of the suggestions solve your problem, try downloading LibreOffice and its Zotero plug-in. If you still cannot change styles, but can insert references and create a bibliography in the one style, I cannot help and others will need to become involved.

uaniko

I tried also on another computer with windows7 and it still does not work. only Chicago manual of style...
I am using sophos antivirus. I do not think that is the problem.

In my desperation I started to use endnote. I could export my zotero library to endnote and that works fine.

I hope there will be a new word plugin with which other styles are also going to be possible!