sorting on author and year; can one sort on 1st author?

mgpell

2 questions

(1) If sorting on year, is there a way to keep the articles within each year sorted according to author?

(2) On searching, is there a way to search for 1st author only?

Thanks,

Gaby

Rintze

(1) If you are referring to sorting in the middle column of Zotero: no, I don't think so.
(2) I don't think so. If I'm correct all authors are seen as an unordered list.

dstillman

For #1, if you sort the middle pane by date, it should automatically sort by first author next.

noksagt

Kind of: sort by "year" will still use the month and/or day (if present). If your database contains mixed forms of the date, the sort results will not be very intuitive: A paper by Shu from August 2007 will be listed before a Piszarev paper from October 2007, for example.

mgpell

Thanks for the responses. I assume then that there is no easy way to remove all of the month information in the date since this is causing the confusion on sorting. For some reason, some pubmed searches save the month, some don't.

Regarding the question of searching on 1st author alone, is there any way of adding that to a "wish-list" for future development?

Thanks

Gaby

Rintze

sort by "year" will still use the month and/or day (if present).

Shouldn't this be changed to sort only according to the year? If people really want to sort according to date (which I'd guess would be a (small) minority), they can still do so by sorting by "Date".

dstillman

I assume then that there is no easy way to remove all of the month information in the date since this is causing the confusion on sorting.

Don't. As Rintze says, we'll just fix this.

Rintze

As an additional nag, could the dates in the "Date" column be shown in a different format? Year-month-day (all numeric, e.g. "2002-05-28") seems more logical than "1999", "Mar 11, 2002" and "Feb 2009".

P.S. I guess the problem here is that while the access and modification dates are timestamps, the date field isn't always parsable or could indicate year-ranges.

dstillman

Ticket created for proper Year sorting.

mgpell

Regarding the searching solely on 1st author, do you think that is appropriate for a new option?

Gaby

konrad_w

Hi I think I have a similar question /request.

I have an Author as a first author in seveal papers. However, there are always different co-authors and Zotero seems to sort the list according to all following authors too.
In the Bibliography I would like to have the entries sorted by first author and year instead of List-of-authors and year.

Example:
I would like to have

Author1 , c-Author, b-Author ' ...' , 2004
Author1, b-Author, c-Author. '....', 2001

instead of

Author1, b-Author, c-Author. '....', 2001
Author1 , c-Author, b-Author ' ...' , 2004

Is that possible somehow?

Cheers, Konrad

Rintze

I think you switched around the years in your example. As for your request, it isn't currently possible, but will be in the new CSL engine that is currently being developed.

edit: I was presuming that in your example, the b-author would come before c-author ("b" becomes before "c"), so your citations would sort correctly when only sorting by author. But that was probably wrong :).

konrad_w

Hi,
thanks for the quick answer.
Well the years should be correct as I would like to have the most recent citation first. That is the whole point of it.
Currently I have publications of one and the same first author with different co-authors which are primarily sorted by the authorlist and then by the year resulting in something like the second example:

Author1, b-Author, c-Author. '....', 2001
Author1 , c-Author, b-Author ' ...' , 2004
Author1, d-Author, b-Author,'....', 1995

Konrad

fbennett

As Rintze says, this isn't currently possible, but the new CSL processor will be able to do what you require, and more. One of the more exotic sorting schemes it will support is this one.

ccba3689

I'm looking for exactly what konrad_w describes here. How can I modify the style Springer Basic (author-date, no "et al.") to order the bibliography by appearance in the text in the case of same first author same year, ignoring second and all other authors, ignoring title. In all other cases sorting should be done acording to authors names and year.

I tried some things in the editor however I did not succed. I could not find any variable to this.

cheers nils

fbennett

If the bibliography names come from a macro "author-bib" (for example), I'm pretty sure that something like this should do it:
<sort>
<key macro="author-bib" names-use-first="1" names-min="2"/>
<key variable="issued"/>
</sort>


Edit: Probably you would want to call a date macro that restricts the date to the year, rather than the raw "issued" variable as shown above. You can do that just by calling the same macro that the style uses to render the year in the bibliography, rather than the variable.

ccba3689

great, very quick response and it works perfectly. Thanks a lot!