Use of 'e.g.' with numbered citations

funnell

When citing by author and year I can specify 'e.g.,' as a suffix and get '(e.g., Grignon, 1933)'. If I do this with numbered citations I get 'e.g., [1]' which doesn't seem right. Is there some way of producing '[e.g., 1]'? (This would be analogous to the way page numbers are put inside the brackets: '[1, p. 2]'.)
(I'm trying this with the IEEE style. Is this something that can be changed by changing the style?)
Thanks.

noksagt

I've never seen a bracket used in that way. Are you sure IEEE wants you to do that?

I'd likely write:(e.g. Ref. [1])

funnell

No, I'm not at all sure, but it seemed logical (to me). Adding 'Ref.' doesn't seem consistent with the normal use of bare brackets, nor with putting page numbers within the brackets, which seems to be accepted. How would you handle multiple references? '(e.g., Refs. [1,2])'?
Has anyone seen real examples of 'e.g.' with numbered citations?

noksagt

Yes, that's how they are pluralized.
See (e.g.?) the abstract at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5546165/?arnumber=5546165

adamsmith

Nothing to add to what noksagt says about correct IEEE style, but since you asked: this behavior is indeed specific to the IEEE.
With every other style you'd get [eg. 1]. The reason is that IEEE also has you put different citations in separate square brackets (i.e. it should be (e.g., Refs [1],[2]) in your example). That means the square brackets apply to individual items, not the whole citation, which in term means that a prefix is outside of them.

(Or in technical term, it's the difference between setting the square brackets as affixes on layout or on a group surrounding citation number and locator).

So if you're not set on IEEE and would rather have [1,2] anyay, you can also get your preferred placement of the e.g.

funnell

I'm not at all set on IEEE, I just picked it because I knew it uses brackets, so your response is music to my ears. Thanks!
Maybe this should be a different discussion, but what's an efficient way of finding a particular kind of style? The particular journal that I'm thinking of at the moment isn't in the style repository, and sometimes I just want to find a style that I like. I could try browsing but there are 1000's of styles and in any case the mouseover only displays the reference-list style, not the citation style.

adamsmith

http://editor.citationstyles.org/searchByExample/
is exactly for this scenario

funnell

That's pretty cool!
Is there any way of distinguishing between '[1,2]' and '[1],[2]'?

adamsmith

no, but IEEE is literally the only style that does [1],[2]

funnell

OK. Thank you again.

funnell

If I specify a prefix of 'e.g.', the Springer Basic style gives ‘[e.g. , 1, 2]’ and the Vancouver style gives ‘(e.g. ,1,2)’, both with an unwanted space between 'e.g.' and the following comma. Is there any way of avoiding that? I've looked at the .csl files and the Visual Editor and don't see any way of controlling it.

bwiernik

Does adding a comma to the prefix fix the issue?

funnell

I hoped it would, but it gives me '(e.g., ,1,2)'.
I can't think of any situation where a comma should have a space before it, so this seems like a bug.

adamsmith

The space is the processor adjusting for the period, so that's at least arguable as a general behavior, even if it's unfortunate here -- but where does that comma come from in the first place? That's pretty clearly a bug.

funnell

Ah, right. You need to supply your own comma for an author-year type citation. So what's next? Is there anything I can do?
I was just looking at github and I see that the word-processor integration is implemented in 3 different languages for LO/OO/NO, Word for Windows and Word for Mac. Does that mean this behaviour could be different in Word? Or is this stuff implemented somewhere else?

adamsmith

The code that's different between the word processors is just how Zotero is called. The actual citation formatting is part of the main Zotero code and thus the same.
All formatting is done by citeproc-js: https://github.com/Juris-M/citeproc-js
normally fbennett comes by here during the weekend to check on error reports, but he's been incredibly busy lately, so I'd monitor this and if he doesn't pop up within a week report on the github.

funnell

By the way, the extra space isn't because of the period in 'e.g.'. It also happens if the prefix is 'for example'.

fbennett

This delimiter bug has been addressed, in citeproc-js release 1.1.119.

For testing, and for projects requiring an immediate fix, install one of the Propachi plugins to run the revised processor in current Zotero. The plugin should be removed at the next Zotero update.