Alphabetizing a bibliography with foreign characters

jimkuras
I use a number of Turkish authors for my work. When their surnames begin with a letter that is not in the English alphabet (example: Öztürkmen), Zotero often has trouble placing it in the right order. "Ö" should fall between "O" and "P" in the Turkish alphabet. When I generate a list of citations, however, it often defaults to the end, landing after "Z". Any suggestions of how I might fix this would be very much appreciated.
  • aurimas
    Are you generating the bibliography in Turkish or English language?
  • jimkuras
    English, it seems. I do not see an option for changing this. I am using web-based Zotero, not the standalone version.
  • aurimas
    Well, an English bibliography would be sorted according to an English alphabet. You can change the language of the bibliography for some citation styles, but that doesn't just change the sorting, it changes the text/punctuation as well.

    I'm also guessing that by web-based Zotero you mean Zotero in Firefox, not zotero.org. If you're using zotero.org, you will not have the option to change the language.
  • adamsmith
    No, this isn´t an English/Turkish thing, at least not to the degree that the OP is seeing it:
    You´d get

    Owens
    Öztürkmen
    Porter

    in an English bibliography (umlauts are just treated like the regular vowel, so you´d get

    Östürkmen
    Owens
    Porter


    It´s likely a character composition issue. Try replacing the first letter of wrongly sorted authors by hand. They should then sort correctly.

    For Turkish styles or with a client set to the TR locale, you do get the correct sorting, i.e.

    Owens
    Östürkmen
    Porter
  • aurimas
    Oops, you are right. I don't think composition affects this though. 'Ö'.normalize('NFC').localeCompare('Ö'.normalize('NFD'), 'tr') == 0

    I guess at this point it's quite important to figure out if you're actually using zotero.org or the Zotero client in Firefox.
  • aurimas
    Yup, looks like Zotero API (and therefore zotero.org) does not sort this correctly. Dan, can you take a look at this?
  • fcheslack
    I think this is just javascript sorting poorly. It looks like citeproc-js falls back to localeCompare. Nodejs doesn't have Intl support built in yet so localeCompare still sorts diacritics after z.
  • fbennett
    @fcheslack: If there is a node module that works, you could substitute that in the composed processor.
  • aurimas
    edited September 26, 2014
    @jimkuras, looks like this will not be a quick fix. If this is possible for you to do, we certainly recommend installing Zotero Standalone or Zotero as a Firefox extension and using Word integration plugins to generate your bibliographies. This will make a lot of things easier for you and will result in proper sorting. (If you do just need to copy paste a bibliography, you can do that as well)

    See https://www.zotero.org/download/
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