Ambiguous description of one-field author input

daniel.r

Zotero allows for two ways to input author information: in "one field" and "two fields". These names are are not very descriptive. More descriptive are the placeholders "(last)"/"(first)" and "(full name)", respectively. However, these placeholders give the impression that they are interchangeable, as in "Albert"/"Einstein" and "Albert Einstein" and that pressing the field switch button toggles between these two ways of writing the same name supports this impression. But contrary to this impression, the documentation states

"Single field mode should be used to institutions (e.g., when the author is “Company A”), while two field mode (last name, first name) should be used for personal names." (https://www.zotero.org/support/adding_items_to_zotero#editing_items)

And I realized that in (Better) BibTeX, the one field/two fields input methods can lead to quite different results, including a different CiteKey. So, I think it would be better to make the supposed usage more apparent to the user. I guess a placeholder "(institution)" and some more description in the field switch button tooltip would be helpful.

bwiernik

You should never use one-field mode for individuals, only for organizations. Always enter personal names as “Einstein, Albert”

bwiernik

@dstillman There was a PR a long time ago to swap in a person or building icon instead of the bars. Is that something that might happen at some point? These confusions come up fairly often.

dstillman

You should never use one-field mode for individuals, only for organizations.

I haven't looked into the details in a long time, but my understanding is that, while that's our advice for most Western names, it's not our recommendation for all names. E.g., @adamsmith just a couple months ago recommended using single-field mode for Mao Zedong.

bwiernik

The current CSL guidance is that single-field mode should always indicate an institution. In CSL 1.1, the “literal” field is slated to be renamed “institution” (https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/blob/ef89f604107d13e36e791e4bdf25b3d745f53d20/schemas/input/csl-data.json#L233). Personal atomic names should be entered together in the Family/Last field. For cases like Mao Zedong, this is ideally handled by the citation style with locale name formatting of the kind possible in CSLm. Those details are still being worked out.