Option to leave out n.d. with some source citations

There are times when the date has been left blank on a source in Zotero because the year has been used in the source already, as part of the title and/or archive location. The abbreviation n.d. is not really appropriate for those occasions. Is there a way to override n.d. from being forced into the citation in CMOS?
  • Thanks, Adam. We'll put it on the wish list.
  • I don’t foresee this sort of thing ever being supported by CSL. I recommend that you simply add the year to the Date field.
  • Yes, I don't see how we can reasonably automate this and it's a level too deep to include a special option in the Word add-on or the item data.
  • It seems to be speculating on what it's finding in the field--grabbing a four-digit numeric string to make it a year. What if it found a space and nothing else? Could the program interpret that to mean, leave me blank?
  • CSL doesn’t process the contents of fields like Title, and it almost certainly won’t in the future. In terms of structured metadata, the year is both part of the title and the date—it makes sense to list it in both places.
  • (I think the idea was to allow putting something -- like a space -- into the date field to mark it as "empty but don't add n.d." )

    Answer is the same though -- that's just too hackish a solution and would create as many problems as it solves. I can already see us trying to troubleshoot why n.d. is randomly not appearing for some citations for someone. Sorry, you'll need to find a different solution for this. I'd agree with bwiernik that having a date appear twice in a citation is probably not a big problem (Chicago Manual purposefully added duplicate years for author-date citations of Newspapers in the last edition, for example, so there's precedent for this)
  • Gotcha. I think we are at the place where we finally need to do what you guys have recommended before--create a variant of the CMOS style for genealogists. (We also need dates formatted 14 Mar 1992.) Let me ask you this. If we do that, is there a way to have the variant with only the differences between it and CMOS and otherwise let it draw the CMOS code? Or, when we start down the road, do we have a complete copy to maintain? And if we do...is there a way to stay abreast of corrections or changes being made to the regular CMOS?
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