Issue with Dates when Adding Citations

Ian Shin

I am using Zotero to keep track of my dissertation research. As a social historian, my research consists of a lot of letters written between the same two individuals in a given year. I've run into an issue with adding the correct citations for these letters as I begin to write.

When I begin to type in the title and date of the letter I want to cite in the red citation insertion pop-up, Zotero populates the menu of options with every letter in my database from that year. But because the menu only displays the year and not the month and day of each option, citing the right letter is becoming a very frustrating guessing game. I've often had to try two or three times before I get the right letter into my footnotes.

Is there a way to tweak the display preferences for the citation insertion pop-up so that I can see the month and day in addition to the year of what I'm citing?

I've thought about deleting the date field and just adding the date into the title of each entry so that the full date shows up when I try to insert a citation. But that would also mean that I could no longer sort my database chronologically in Zotero.

Any help / ideas would be greatly appreciated.

adamsmith

sounds like you'd be better of using the classic view of the add citation dialog - either on a one-off basis or permanently:
http://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_usage#switching_to_the_classic_view
there, you can add a "date" column (by clicking on the little table icon at the top right) that displays the full date.

Ian Shin

Perfect! Not quite as sleek and sexy as the "modern" view of the Add Citation dialog, but it'll have to do.

Thanks!