Formatting issues with MS Word Alpha, Chicago Author-Date

1) When I use the insert citation button for this style, the plugin adds my citation but if there is more than one author, I get: (Vain, et al. 1993). I believe it should be (Vain et al. 1993) without the comma. At least that is what my instructor told me today.

2) When the plugin made my bibliography, the first line was indented and the rest were not. I believe the first line should not be indented and the rest should be in this style.

3) My bibliography contained 2 references starting with the same author's last name (Armstrong). One was only him, the other had him and a bunch of others. The plugin put the newer reference first, listing all the individuals, then the older reference second, only using a "--" instead of the author's name (which should have been the name, because the other authors were not there, hence it was not exactly the same).

I love this tool so far and I'm spreading the word to everyone I know. I'm thinking about having a seminar for the people in my department to show them how to use Zotero (after my comps). Right now I'm using it for my dissertation. Would love to see additional output styles, perhaps those used in scientific journals.

Thanks!
  • Is there any plan to fix these?
  • Hi,
    This is still a problem for me. As I'm writing my dissertation, I'm going to have probably around a hundred references in my reference list that need attention, in addition to the hundreds of in-text citations that will have to be manually edited. Help? Of course, a different output style to choose would help a lot too.
    Thanks.
  • Created a ticket for this. Relevant excerpts from the style manual (or URLs of pages with examples) would be appreciated here or on the ticket.
  • Hi,
    Thanks for responding so quickly. Here is a URL from the Chicago Manual of Style with some commonly-used citations (book, journal article, etc.).

    http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html

    Is this what you were going for? I can add some of my citations here also if you need.
    Thanks,
    Callista
  • You can change the out put directly in the document until the fix/upgrade. With EndNote, for example, you cannot directly (i.e.g, in the document) change the way the citation is entered. Zotero's plug-in will.
  • Hi folks,

    Thanks for the discussion and CMS references. I wanted to bring up an additional facet, the "more than one work by the same author in the same year" letter suffix notation as described in:

    http://writing.colostate.edu/guides/researchsources/documentation/cms_author/intextvariations.cfm#8

    I'm running into this currently. For example, I would like the Zotero MS-Word integration to generate:

    "These concepts are found in (Smith 2005a) and also described in (Smith 2005b)."

    I've poked around in the preferences etc. but haven't found anything on whether this is currently supported.

    Zotero is just so fantastic. I'm really enjoying using it. I'm a new user since yesterday. Wish I had it years ago!

    Thanks,
    Chuck
  • edited August 28, 2007
    I'm running into this currently. For example, I would like the Zotero MS-Word integration to generate:

    "These concepts are found in (Smith 2005a) and also described in (Smith 2005b)."
    That should work without problem.

    What does not work correctly is the shortening of author names when you have those two in the same citation; e.g. (Smith, 2005a, 2005b). That, along with the oft-requested ability to suppress author-name are the two obvious things missing for proper author-date support.
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