CMOS 17 footnote citations not distinguishing two authors with same surname by initial

luery

Good morning. I am running Zotero 5.0.87 in Word for Mac 16.37.

I am citing two different authors in a document using the Chicago Manual of Style 17 (note) style. The Chicago Manual of Style 17 asks that in notes we distinguish two authors with identical surnames by their initials.

At the moment, Zotero is not doing that. Which is puzzling, because on another occasion earlier this year Zotero did correctly distinguish two Smiths using their initials.

The two sources are:

* Darwin, Francis, ed. Charles Darwin: His Life Told in an Autobiographical Chapter, and in a Selected Series of His Published Letters. Abridged. London: John Murray, 1892.
* Darwin, Charles R. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. 1st ed. London: John Murray, 1859.

When I cite these two sources in the same document, Zotero does not distinguish the two Darwins: it generates footnotes saying
* Darwin, Charles Darwin, 166.
* Darwin, Origin of Species, 130.

They should say
* F. Darwin, Charles Darwin, 166.
* C. Darwin, Origin of Species, 130.

Unless something has changed in the Zotero style or under the hood, the only possible explanation I can think of for this behaviour is that one person is an author and the other is an editor.

Any ideas? Many thanks.

adamsmith

The style is not set up to do this (and I'm suspecting you misremember earlier behavior).
The Chicago (author-date) style does do this, and there, it's clearly marked as a requirement in the manual (15.22).

For notes, we only read:

Full names or initials are included only when authors with the same last name must be distinguished from one another.

without a clarifying example. I'm not sure how to read this. When do authors have to be distinguished? Whenever they have the last name? (Though I'd expect the manual to say that explicitly then).
I'm pretty sure we could do this in the style, but I'm not convinced that we should given the above.

luery

Hi adamsmith, thanks for responding so quickly.

I was also looking at 14.32. It seemed to me the purpose of a short-form note citation is to facilitate looking up the reference in the Bibliography. So I had read the part you quoted as implying that two authors with the same surname should be distinguished by their initial. But you are right that, grammatically, the guidelines are ambiguous.

Thank you for answering my question: I understand now that this is how the Zotero style is designed to behave.

However, even if CMOS *is* saying that it's a matter of the writer's discretion, I would argue Zotero should distinguish them with initials by default, on the principle that where the guidelines are ambiguous the software should lean in the direction that increases clarity in citation. But perhaps this differs from a design philosophy in Zotero development. If that is so, I don't expect this small question to weigh heavily enough in the balance to effect a change (and perhaps it shouldn't!).

bwiernik

@luery Personally, I agree that adding initials to help readers find the item quickly in an alphabetically sorted reference list makes sense. APA and Chicago Author-Date have this rule for that reason. I suspect the optional nature for Chicago Note is because the the short title can disambiguate, even if it doesn't provide an immediate guide to position in the author list.

That said, this is probably the rule in APA style that is misunderstood most frequently. We get a lot of questions with people complaining about initials being added, so I fear that adding it to Chicago Note would spawn a lot of complaints from authors not wanting the initials.

adamsmith

so I fear that adding it to Chicago Note would spawn a lot of complaints from authors not wanting the initials.

yes, that's my concern as well. But I think the argument to err on the side of more information/clarity is pretty strong.

bwiernik

I’ll defer to your judgment—you’re much more familiar with work in fields using Chicago

DWL-SDCA

Something to keep in mind:
As a reader of articles or a reviewer of manuscripts I'm always pleased with more information/clarity. However, in academia some professors use reference formatting as a way to deduct from the score of a student's submission. I've thought about this a lot for the past couple of years after students in my Zotero seminar received lower scores because they used Zotero to produce references based on the current APA style but the professor wanted the students to use the previous style. The course syllabus said to use APA without specifying the edition. I 'went to bat' for the students but the dean of the college said that the students should have discussed this with the professor before jumping to conclusions about which style to use. It may seem ridiculous (I think that it is ridiculous) but I recommend including a statement in the Zotero documentation that 1) Zotero styles are rightly for the current version of the style; and 2) users should clarify with their target if requirements may differ from the current standard. You may think that this is unique to a situation at my university a few years ago but I've talked with faculty and students at other universities in the US and Canada who know of similar situations.

edit:
In my conversation with the professor wanting the older version of APA style she told me that it is necessary to have an objective way to lower a grade and that subjective quality of prose or content may not be sufficient if the grade was contested. She told me that the first thing she reads is the reference list because it us there that objective grading can be done. Very, very sad.

adamsmith

Thankfully, I've literally never heard of a faculty member with the same type of fetish for Chicago Manual's citation rules as is apparently no uncommon for APA, so we don't have to worry about this here ;).

I think adding this to the CMoS styles is the right decision, though might take me a bit.