MLA: How to differentiate in-line citations of multiple works by single author?

davidreader

When using MLA style, I noticed that when I cite multiple titles by the same author, Zotero does not differentiate them using different short titles as per the style sheet.

MLA Style

It is important to note that, according to González, "this book is very interesting" (González, This book 54). However, she later amends her views, saying "that book is more interesting" (González, That book 122).

In my document it looks as if both quotes are from a single book. In the bibliography, however, both titles appear:

It is important to note that, according to González, "this book is very interesting" (González 54). However, she later amends her views, saying "that book is more interesting" (González 122).

How can I make it so Zotero differentiates the multiple works by the same author in in-line citations? Thank you!

adamsmith

That should work out of the box, but I see it doesn't always. I believe I know what's wrong.
Could you insert a bibliography for that document and copy the entries for the the two González books here?

davidreader

“lo que estos críticos vienen a decirnos más o menos es que debemos ser conscientes de nuestras limitaciones y tenerlas presentes en todo momento, lo que parece muy razonable” (González 15)

“que fue trasladada de caldeo en latin e de latin en romance” (González 70)


González, Cristina, ed. Libro del Caballero Zifar. 3rd ed. Madrid: Catédra, 1998. Print.
González, Cristina. “El cavallero Zifar” y el reino lejano. Madrid, España: Editorial Gredos, 1984. Print.

adamsmith

That's odd. This I can't replicate.
Could you export the two items to Bibliontology RDF (right click --> export selected items - uncheck notes and files), open the exported file with any text editor (notepad, TextEdit) select all, copy, & paste to gist.github.com, create a public gist (at the bottom of the screen), and post the URL here.

davidreader

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/6743611

davidreader

Do Zotero and MS Word encode "á" differently:

<foaf:surname>Gonz√°lez</foaf:surname>

<foaf:surname>GonzaÃÅlez</foaf:surname>

and then the plug in reads the two different forms as two distinct author surnames?

adamsmith

yes, that's what's going on here. Actually neither should happen in the output, this should just be González. Do you remember how exactly you entered those items into Zotero?
If you just retype the á in both cases (or copy&paste from the forum) I'd expect this to work correctly.

erikekman

There is a field called short title. Is it populated in these references?
I was able to do this just now with three records by the same author all with a short title:

Blab la bla(Salvo García, “Las Heroidas en la General estoria”). Bla bla blabadibla.(Salvo García, “Materia ovidiana”) blab la bla(Salvo García, “Mitos”)

Salvo García, Irene. “La materia ovidiana en la General estoria de Alfonso X: Problemas metodológicos en el estudio de su recepción.” Estudios sobre la Edad Media, el Renacimiento y la temprana modernidad. Ed. Jimena Gamba Corradina and Francisco Bautista Pérez. San Millán de la Cogolla: Cilengua. Centro Internacional de Investigación de la Lengua Española, 2010. 359–369. Print.
---. “Las Heroidas en la </i>General estoria</i> de Alfonso X: texto y glosa en el proceso de traducción y resemantización de Ovidio.” Cahiers d’études hispaniques médiévales 32.1 (2009): 205–228. Print.
---. “Los mitos de la creación de la Metamorfosis de Ovidio (Met. I, v. 5-162) en la General estoria de Alfonso X.” Modelos Latinos En La Castilla Medieval. Ed. Mónica Castillo Lluch and Marta López Izquierdo. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2010. 201–222. Print. Medievalia hispánica 14.

adamsmith

thanks erik, but that's actually not relevant. When the short title field is empty, Zotero just falls back to the title field.

davidreader

Thanks Erik! Adam, I reentered á in both records in zotero and it fixed.

now, how do you suppose it got messed up to begin with?

adamsmith

I don't know a ton about character encoding, but basically Zotero expects characters to be in utf-8 unless explicitly told otherwise. Normally when that's not the case, they'll look weird in the data, too, (like �) but there are encodings that look right on screen, but are still messed up.
Do you remember how you imported those items into Zotero? Possibly we can fix that on import.

davidreader

I think they were imported the U Oregon Catalog: http://uolibraries.worldcat.org/title/cavallero-zifar-y-el-reino-lejano/oclc/12251332&referer=brief_results

adamsmith

yeah, that's it. The letter exported in the non-Latin Endnote export of Worldcat (which we use because it works better for other characters) is actually not a regular a with accent - the difference is unfortunately not visible in many fonts, but it's definitely there. I'll see what we can do, but it's tricky.
Best I can recommend for now is to use the local catalog (i.e. janus) which imports this correctly for anything Spanish language.

I don't get why OCLC has such trouble just producing fricking utf-8. There are all types of issue with that in the firstsearch version of worldcat, too. It's as if this were 1990. grmpf.

davidreader

har har har thanks very much for the help!

adamsmith

ok, we still want to fix this but it's not going to happen quickly. If you (or anyone else who comes across this) cares for the technical details, see here:
https://github.com/zotero/translators/commit/cb29bd3782e19769173007b074e4367a3f9057d6#commitcomment-4204677
with further links