Two suggestions to improve citations

djlewis

I love Zotero! But here are two suggestions for citations to make me love it even more.

1. Provide a blank option for page number label, so I can fill in something that might not be in the dropdown list: page, book, chapter, column, etc. The other day I wanted to specify a timestamp for a video, like (Hoohah, 2000, time 3:45) and couldn't. No, don't add that to the list; give me a blank; no reason you should have to think of every possibility. Kindle location is another one.

2. Provide an option to suppress year as well as well as author. I don't know if it's allowed in any official style manual, but sometimes I'd like to pepper a passage with just page numbers, like: blah blah (Pinkerton, 1898, p. 23); blah blah (p. 26); bye now (p. 30).

#1 is much more important than #2, and probably easier.

Thank. --David

fbennett

For (1) we could consider just suppressing the label when there is a non-parseable string at the front of the locator (to yield "time 3:50" instead of "p. time 3:50", say). That would be simpler than adding a "blank" label, which might be confusing to other users. Before jumping there, would need to consider whether it might interfere with other use cases. Can't think of any issues with it offhand.

Thoughts on this from @adamsmith , @Rintze , @bwiernik ?

djlewis

How about "(custom)" or "(user def)" instead of blank, though blank is what you would get, plus suppression of any parsing. Depending on a non-parseable string sounds complicated. It would be at the bottom of the list, so "out of the way". And people can easily experiment to see what happens.

fbennett

In the absence of conflicts with other use cases, though, it would just do what you expect.

adamsmith

For 1), while there are some rare situations where this won't work (mostly related to ibid), in most cases just suffix will work for this. I'm fine with having an empty locator label added in some future iteration and we've long talked about doing this, though I recall Bruce had some concerns last time it came up.

I'd be concerned about trying to put some hack in there to suppress locator labels. There are too many edge cases to think through and it's going to be very confusing for users if it goes wrong.

fbennett

No complaints here!

bwiernik

Yes, I would really like a blank locator box with the option to enter an ad hoc locator label. Agree with @adamsmith that hackery to suppress the label would lead to way more headaches than it solves.

Regarding suppress year, I think it would be nice, as it would enable smoother transition between author-date and note styles for the constructions like @djlewis describes. At present, one just types the page numbers in the text, so these don’t move to notes (with ibid, etc) if you switch to a note style.

fbennett

We should be clear, though, that neither change is likely to be introduced in the near future. It's not clear whether introducing a wildcard-label kludge is a good idea, and if so, exactly how it should behave; and suppression of all cite content except label and locator is completely uncharted territory, both in its coding requirements, and in the additional use cases to be specified.