Sorting by last author

julien.delpierre

In biology the last author refers to the senior author and it would be fantastic to sort by "lab" adding the possibility to sort the bibliography by last author

adamsmith

You want that for the bibliography? I've seen that as a request for the Zotero middle panel before and that makes sense to me, but before we implement that as an option for citation styles, I think we'd want to see some examples of where that'd be required.

julien.delpierre

Sorry I wasn't clear, I mean as an option to sort the collection. It may not be required for bibliography except for personnal communication (mail...).

adamsmith

first requested here: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/44270/sort-by-last-author/

cheflo

As mentioned above, I also think this could be useful for areas like biology and medicine, where articles are usually remembered by what lab they came out of, i.e. the last author. So sorting for last author could be nice, although searching for it already works well.

Another example of where the last author field would be useful is for the Zotfile/Zotero renaming rules. It would be nice to have last authors name included in the file name and potentially even have directories grouped by last author (with %-renaming in zotfile).

bwiernik

(I believe Zotfile has a last author wildcard for renaming. )

cheflo

Does it? How do I use it? I only found this 2 year old thread on the topic on the zoero foums https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/31093/corresponding-author-wildcard/ and no mention of it in the wildcards section of Zotfile (unless you build your own wildcards)

bwiernik

Oh, my mistake. I thought that someone had added Last Author to the default wildcards list.

In any event, you can do this using the custom wildcards.

1. Install Zotfile
2. Open about:config in Firefox/Zotero Standalone
3. Search zotfile.wildcard
4. Add the following string to the "extensions.zotfile.wildcards.user":

{"G": {"field": "author", "operations": [ {"function": "exec", "regex": "[A-Za-z]+$"} ] } }

This will assign the last author's last name to the wildcard %G, which you can then use with Zotfile's renaming function.

Edit: Well, this actually will grab whichever author is last in the string Zotfile uses for renaming, which is limited by the "Maximum number of authors" setting. I will submit a patch to Zotfile to add support for senior authors.

bwiernik

Pull request to support senior author renaming in Zotfile here:
https://github.com/jlegewie/zotfile/pull/201

bwiernik

It's been added to Zotfile. Install the beta from Github and you'll be able to rename using last author with %q