Fully Automatic In-Text Citations

Editide

I'm new to Zotero, so this may be a silly question, but I don't see it answered in the forums or the documentation. I use BibTex when I'm working in LaTeX, so I'm accustomed to being able to automate the creation of both parenthetical and in-text citations. I'm using these terms a little differently from how some people use them, so I'll explain: An example of a parenthetical citation is (Smith 2009). An example of an in-text citation is Smith (2009).

The Zotero documentation seems to indicate that Zotero can only create parenthetical author-date citations with the author's name included or suppressed. Thus, if I would like to create what I'm calling an in-text citation, I have to write Smith myself and then insert the parenthetical year using Zotero.

My concern about this is that the spelling of the author's name is now subject to my human error and may need to change as my bibliography evolves. For example, if I later find that the name is misspelled, correcting it in the Zotero database will not correct it in the in-text citations. I have to manually correct them myself. Also, if I have two first authors named Smith, Zotero correctly disambiguates them with their initials. However, this disambiguation cannot happen if I suppress the author's name in the citation. Again, I must do it manually.

Is there no way to get Zotero to handle the citation fully by itself? If there is a way, please point me in the right direction. If there is no way, is anyone working to improve the situation? Is there a timeline for when users can expect a complete solution?

As an aside, it would be really nice if it were possible to suppress either the author, the year or the parentheses. This would allow one to create automatic citations of the form "In 1996, Smith and Jones said …" and citations that follow the APA 5th edition in suppressing the year when a work is cited multiple times in a single paragraph.

Thanks,
John

adamsmith

There is no way to automate that in Zotero and no, no one is working on it (and doing it right would be substantial work to accomodate, e.g., rules like APA's insistence to use ampersands in parentheses but spelled out "and" outside of parentheses). Also of course GUI issues etc. There are a number of old threads with long discussions on this if you're interested in the history, but the gist of it is that I don't think I'd expect much movement on this in the next couple of years.

Editide

Thanks, adamsmith. Your insights are helpful. It's too bad; Zotero looks pretty nice in other ways, but this is a pretty important feature for me. I don't understand why the vagaries of "and" or ampersand would be a significant hurdle compared to all the excellent work required just to make this system work. BibTeX seems to handle those vagaries with aplomb. I guess it must require some additions to the model to accommodate the extra variety.