Zotero leaves out comma in in-text citations

SaLi14

Hello,
I have been using the APA 6th edition and everything worked fine when inserting an in-text citation: e.g. (Baily, 2010).

However now suddenly the comma is missing between the authors name and the date... I can of course manually add the comma but I have way too many citations for that..

Also, in the bar that shows up where you type in the name you want, it gives me the preview WITH the comma, but in the text it disappears...

Thank you for your help!

emil.erixon

I am experiencing the same issue, that the comma between name and date is missing in some of my APA in-text citations.

Any suggestions?

adamsmith

Zotero's APA style definitely still uses the comma (the preview is irrelevant for formatting, though).

Most of the reports about issues like this stem from confusing American Psychological Association with American Sociological Association. Both exist as a 6th edition for Zotero and the latter doesn't use a comma between author and year.

bwiernik

@dstillman Is there anything that could be done to reduce this confusion, which seems to come up about once a week?

adamsmith

I'm assuming the problem is that ASA is bundled and people see "American .... Association, 6th edition" in their list of styles and select it.
IIRC the bundling was updated based on empirics, though, so I don't think removing ASA because of this is the right choice.

bwiernik

I'm wondering if maybe it might be reasonable to add a prompt, "You selected American Sociological Association. Did you mean American Psychological Association?" with a "Don't ask again" option?

dstillman

How about adding "(APA)" and "(ASA)" automatically? I don't know how much it will help with this, but it seems like we should say "APA" anyway, since that's what people are looking for.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/r1wh96pl0aydqvn/doc-prefs-apa-asa.png?dl=0

bwiernik

I think that will help. Maybe put APA and ASA first? Not exactly sure which would be more noticeable.

dstillman

I guess another question would be whether we need to include "6th edition" for ASA at all. @adamsmith added the edition to the title in February. Was there any particular reason for that? We don't include the edition for most styles, and, unlike APA, we don't have an older version of ASA.

adamsmith

The reason for that was to signal an update to a recent-ish version of the manual because people were asking about this and unsure whether the style had been updated. I'd like to keep it.

I like the acronyms after the title as a first try to avoid confusion.

dstillman

OK, I've added the acronyms in the latest beta.

sabdeldyem

Hi All, I have faced the same problem now and the solution seems to be as follows: From the document itself (not Zotero app), click the 1- Zotero tap either in word or in google docs (as in my case), then 2- chose document preferences. This will open a Zotero window in which you can 3- pick the right style. Then 4- click ok and 5- click Zotero tap again to 6- click refresh this time and see the updated style. Unfortunately, I was trying to fix this problem in Zotero app which is not correct. Hope this helps anyone here and good luck for anyone working on his/ her research.