Character "ø" alphabetical classification

jgamble

I am hoping someone out there might be able to advise me on this. I am putting together a bibliography which has a number of Danish sources. One of the authors, but the last name of Bøgh is being misplaced in the bibliography because the ø is getting registered as an English 'o' rather than as a Danish "ø". In Danish, this letter is the second last in the alphabet, and so this author should be listed right at the end of the 'B' section rather than somewhere in the middle. I am wondering if there is any way to correct this in zotero? I am concerned that every time I do a refresh it will switch the reference back to the wrong place. This is an important document and a very long one. I don't want to have to keep checking every time I pdf or save it. Any advice would be most appreciated!

aurimas

Is the document written in Danish? If that's the case and your bibliography appears in Danish as well (e.g. using Danish words for things like "in", "editor", "accessed") then I _think_ you may want to install an updated version of the citation processor (it hasn't been officially released yet, but I believe this was recently fixed)

If the document is written in English though, then the ø _should_ be sorted with other o's, since English readers have no idea that they should look for ø at the end.

jgamble

Thank you for your response aurimas. I'm kind of in the middle with this one I guess. The document is in English, but I have a reviewer who is Danish and who wants the ø to be sorted correctly as per the Danish alphabet. I guess there is no way to over-ride zotero / instruct it in any way to make just this change then?

DWL-SDCA

FWIW If your reference list contains more than a few authors with names beginning with B and the primary readership will be from outside Northwest Europe, I recommend commenting in your reply letter that placement of the name could confuse most readers. From my own experience this has confused me. Indeed, until reading this thread I suspected that the names being sorted at the end was due to a technical problem in the sorting process rather than a desired behavior.

edit additional comment.

I just looked at the reference lists of articles in 2 issues of the Nordic Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, an English language journal with a Dane as editor. The names with "decorated" characters were sorted as though the character was without decoration.

aurimas

In terms of overriding the sorting, I don't believe there is an easy way. (There's a pretty messy workaround that involves creating a custom style) Interestingly, this is the second time someone has brought this up in the past few weeks, so perhaps there is an actual need to specify sorting that does not match the locale of text. (I'd like to say no and say that this is just a misunderstanding of how sorting is meant to work in different languages)