Upgrade StorageDisambiguation suffixes, sorting and collapse behavior
I'd like to understand how disambiguation suffixes are assigned, and how suffixed years (e.g., 2018a, 2018b) are treated when sorting. (This would be very complicated to test for all possibilities, so I'm hoping you can help here. I didn't see specific information about these technical details posted anywhere, but a link would be great if I missed it.)
1) When/how are items assigned a particular disambiguating suffix? Is that something the user can (indirectly?) control? Is it the first paper entered, or is it the one nearest the beginning of the document? Or something else internal to Zotero? Is there any way to force one of the references (i.e., the more important one) to be "a"?
In other words, why is one paper "2018a" and the other one "2018b"? Why not the other order?
2) Are these always listed in alphabetical order in the bibliography? I assume so, and it seems like it, but I just want to confirm. Is this (based for example on alphabetical citing by title?) what determines the suffixes?
3) For cites, how is the order of (2018a, 2018b) determined? Is it based on the order they are entered (like papers from different years), or is it automatically reordered so that 'a' precedes 'b'?
(Note: I'm aware there are separate controls for ordering by year or allowing the user to customize the order based on how they are entered. Does that also apply to the suffixed years or do they work differently?)
4) Do the answers for the questions above vary by style, or are they inherent in Zotero?
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My motivation for asking is the following: I'm currently putting together a large appendix with hundreds of references in a table. This will go at the end of my final document, and some of those references will already be cited above (in unpredictable orders).
I have some entries now that look like this:
My question: I prefer to maintain the a-b order, rather than having them reversed like
Note: I am not using a style that has order-by-year in cites (and collapse by year). It's just the order I enter them in. But for this specific issue, it seems odd if that means, when I can't predict which will be "a" or "b", that sometimes they might be reversed.
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Maybe the best solution to this is to set collapse to collapse the suffixes too? (Does that even work if they aren't ordered "a-b" but "b-a"?)
1) When/how are items assigned a particular disambiguating suffix? Is that something the user can (indirectly?) control? Is it the first paper entered, or is it the one nearest the beginning of the document? Or something else internal to Zotero? Is there any way to force one of the references (i.e., the more important one) to be "a"?
In other words, why is one paper "2018a" and the other one "2018b"? Why not the other order?
2) Are these always listed in alphabetical order in the bibliography? I assume so, and it seems like it, but I just want to confirm. Is this (based for example on alphabetical citing by title?) what determines the suffixes?
3) For cites, how is the order of (2018a, 2018b) determined? Is it based on the order they are entered (like papers from different years), or is it automatically reordered so that 'a' precedes 'b'?
(Note: I'm aware there are separate controls for ordering by year or allowing the user to customize the order based on how they are entered. Does that also apply to the suffixed years or do they work differently?)
4) Do the answers for the questions above vary by style, or are they inherent in Zotero?
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My motivation for asking is the following: I'm currently putting together a large appendix with hundreds of references in a table. This will go at the end of my final document, and some of those references will already be cited above (in unpredictable orders).
I have some entries now that look like this:
(Smith 2018a, 2018b)My question: I prefer to maintain the a-b order, rather than having them reversed like
(Smith 2018b, 2018a). Is there a risk of that ordering changing based on whether/how those references are cited elsewhere in the paper? Does Zotero automatically order them alphabetically within cites?Note: I am not using a style that has order-by-year in cites (and collapse by year). It's just the order I enter them in. But for this specific issue, it seems odd if that means, when I can't predict which will be "a" or "b", that sometimes they might be reversed.
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Maybe the best solution to this is to set collapse to collapse the suffixes too? (Does that even work if they aren't ordered "a-b" but "b-a"?)
2) see 1)
3) Citation order is determined by the citation sort keys of the citation style. If there are none or if they are exhausted (e.g. you only sort by author and year and those are the same), the order they are added to the citation does determine their order.
4) So except for 2), which is fixed, this is controlled by styles.
(This all refers to expected behavior; the edge cases here aren't among the parts of citeproc that see most testing, so bugs possible; I know some of this isn't working how it should in Mendeley, e.g., presumably because of an older citeproc version)
So for (3), if I do not have any sorting setup within cites (I don't want it in general, not for years), then these won't be automatically changed and will, in theory, sometimes get "out of order" like
(Smith 2018b, 2018a), correct?In that case, the simplest thing to do will probably be to just try to remember to 'proofread' the order of these at the end. I don't think I want to change the style overall.
And good news about it being assigned based on normal sort order in the bibliography. That will look clean.