Citations do not always include year

stockholmmarkus

Hi,

I am currently finishing up my dissertation (around 80,000 words excluding bibliography, using CMoS 17th ed (note)). I'm running Zotero standalone 5.0.89 on a stationary MacOS Mojave and a Macbook pro with Catalina)

A number of Zotero-related issues are coming up at this stage. The one that I haven't found an answer to by searching the forum is that the year of publication is displayed in some citations but not in others. Here is one of my footnotes as an illustration (note that the Nagel book lacks year of publication):

"See, for instance Scheffler, “Is the Basic Structure Basic?,” 2006; Nagel, Equality and Partiality; Estlund, “Debate: Liberalism, Equality, and Fraternity in Cohen’s Critique of Rawls,” 1998; Cohen, “Taking People as They Are?,” 2001."

This happens throughout the document. I have unsuccesfully tried to see a pattern, and noticed that it does NOT seem to be the case that
- Citations with years are articles and those without are books or other media
- Citations with years are cited for the first time and those without have been cited earlier in the document
- Citations with years were cited immediately before and those without were not
- Citations with years have years in the metadata and those without do not
- Citations with years are the only citations in the particular citation and those without are among multiple citations

I HAVE noticed that the citations that do have a year display it every time they are cited (unless it's a shortened citation because it was cited immediately before)

Please help me find, and hopefully solve, the problem here!

Also, I had hoped that it would be possible to remove the full stop (period) after citations, in order to continue the sentence. Looking around on the forum I learned that the preferred way of doing it is to instead add comments in suffix and prefix. I don't have time to revise all the notes in my document however, especially not since Zotero is painstakingly slow every time I edit a citation. Moreover, this does not solve the problem if there are multiple works cited, since at least the CMoS 17th ed (note) will add a semicolon before the final one. See the semicolon before Cohen, "Taking People as They Are?" in the example above.

So, is there a way to manually edit the style to solve it? Otherwise, I figure I'll Unlink Citations in the finalised document and do it manually.

/Markus

stockholmmarkus

Update regarding the first question:
I've discovered a solution that works for some of the instances:

The year sometimes appears if I edit each citation without a year and remove and reinsert them.
This might indicate that the problem is due to the fact that I've created a large word document out of several separate ones, when compiling the dissertation, and that the ones without a year are still in some other format.

I thought, however, that the "Refresh" button would do the same thing. And this solution doesn't work for all the instances.

adamsmith

Have you tried adding a bibliography?
The Chicago (note) style would basically never add a year and certainly not for the items you have above (date is only printed when two citations are otherwise identical). So either you have lots of duplicates in your citations or you have a custom version of the style.

stockholmmarkus

Hi,

This is excellent advice. I had not tried creating a bibliography because of the time it takes, given the length of the document. This time it was pretty quick, however.

I was mistaken in thinking that there should be a year in the notes. It turns out that the citations with years are duplicates. I guess the problem is that I have merged different documents into this master file. So, what is the best way to fix it?

I guess I will have to manually remove and replace all the citations that turn out as duplicates in the bibliography?

adamsmith

I guess I will have to manually remove and replace all the citations that turn out as duplicates in the bibliography?

Most likely I'm afraid, yes. This isn't just due to merging documents, though: typically Zoteor would handle that just fine. Either these items are 1. From different libraries
2. Duplicates in an existing library
3. Duplicates where 1 of them has been deleted from the Zotero library

The exact solution for these three scenarios differs:
1. and 3 Figure out which items are from your current local library and delete&replace the others. The easiest way to do this is to edit the citation, click on the blue/grey bubble and see if there is an "Open in Library" option. If there is, it's from your local library. Alternatively, you can use field codes to figure this out https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/word_field_codes

2. Don't change anything in the document: merge (don't delete) the items in Zotero and refresh

You can absolutely split your document into chunks again for this. Also make sure you have automatic updating of citations turned off in the document preferences.

stockholmmarkus

Hi,
I think the problem is that I migrated from Mendeley when Elsevier bought them. In fact, I used Zotero first, then migrated to Mendeley, and then back again. The oldest parts of this document were written while I used Mendeley, so I guess that explains the duplicates: The duplicates refer back to Mendeley citations, and I've later added citations that point to the Zotero library?

I've ruled out scenario 2. I then tried your instructions for a citation that only appears three times. Two of them didn't have the "Open in library option", and after I had replaced them, it stopped appearing as a duplicate in the bibliography, and the year disappeared from the note!

Many thanks for the advice. There's a lot of boring work to be done, but now that I know what the problem is and that the work isn't pointless, it at least feels meaningful!

Edit:
The field codes might be a quicker way, since it takes 4-5 minutes to edit some citations. Is there more info on how to find duplicates by seeing the field codes, apart from the link you posted?

dstillman

Yes, Zotero can read and use existing Mendeley citations in a document, but they won't be linked to items in your Zotero library, even if those items were imported from Mendeley.

stockholmmarkus

Thanks for all the help. It must have been the Mendeley citations that turned out as duplicates.

I've now solved the problem by manually editing all Mendeley citations that created duplicates. I noticed what I guess are bugs while doing this:
When I followed your recommendation, adamsmith, and checked to see if there was an "Open in library" option, then I had to restart Zotero before replacing the citation. Every time I tried to simply edit it immediately after having checked this, Zotero would just get stuck when trying to update it.

Generally, I noticed that I had to restart Zotero after every 5 citations edits, or so, or the same thing would happen.

And as you all know, the updates were very slow even when I did this (I didn't break up the document, though).

dstillman

What do you mean by "Zotero would just get stuck"? What happened?

Can you provide exact steps to reproduce that? Are you able to submit a Debug ID for that happening?