[Solved!] How do i NOT sort footnotes alphabetically?

DoulosI

I have written my entire thesis in the SBL style (Author, work (italics), page number). I need to change the style to a style called "Citation Compass"/"Kildekompasset", which is based on APA 6th footnotes as far as I know.

When I change the document preferences from SBL to Citation Compass, all footnotes are automatically sorted alphabetically. And this is where the problems come in:

So in a lot of footnotes I have something like this (example): . When I change the style in the Zotero document preferences, Zotero automatically sorts the footnotes alphabetically, which makes the footnote look something like this: . Which looks pretty stupid. So. Is there any way I can change the style or the Zotero preferences so that it does NOT sort the footnotes alphabetically? In other words: I want to change the citation style to Citation Compass, but keep Zotero from changing the ORDER of the works cited.

Alphabetical sorting also produces some problems with direct quotations. If I have two quotes from two different authors in the same sentence, and I want to put the citation in the footnotes, I need to be able to sort the footnote citations in the order of the quotations. If Taylor’s quote comes before Berger’s quote in the sentence, Taylor should come before Berger in the footnote also.

I know that, when making NEW citations, I can unselect “keep sources sorted”. But that doesn’t help me with the 250+ footnotes already in my thesis document. Hoping for your guidance on this matter, dear Zotero Community.

Edit: Thanks be to @adamsmith for excellent and speedy help with solving this issue!

bwiernik

The style guide calls for sources to be sorted alphabetically as a default. If you want to reorder them for a particular citation, such as your quoting case, you can drag the blue bubbles in the Zotero Add Citation window to rearrange.

DoulosI

I know. But do I really need to drag bubbles for every single citation in my document? There must be some easy way to change the style in style editor do keep this from happening?

bwiernik

You can edit the style to remove the ‘sort’ section from the bibliography section.

I’m saying though that the style guide calls for alphabetical except when there is a reason to deviate. For most of the citations in your document, alphabetical is likely fine.

adamsmith

You can edit the style to remove the ‘sort’ section from the bibliography section.

That should read the sort section of the <citation> section, i.e. delete this <sort>
<key macro="author-bib" names-min="3" names-use-first="1"/>
<key macro="date-sort-group"/>
<key macro="date-sort-date" sort="ascending"/>
<key variable="status"/>
</sort>

See https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/style_editing_step-by-step for general instructions.

DoulosI

You're correct, for many citations, alph. is fine. But I have carefully chosen the order of the citations according to which citation is the most important for my argument.

Edit: Do you know where in the editor do I need to remove the "sort" section? A lot of places, or just some? To be clear, I only want to change this in the footnotes. The bibliography should still be sorted alphabetically.

DoulosI

@adamsmith , would this change the bibliography or the footnotes? As my last edit suggest, I would like the bibliography to stay alphabetically sorted, but the footnotes should be sorted the way I have added them with the SBL style.

I could use either the Citation Compass/Kildekompasset or the Norsk APA-manual (APA 7th note)

adamsmith

That changes only the footnotes (i.e. citations), not the bibliography. The above is the Citation Compass style.

DoulosI

Thanks, Adam! :)
Will I ever be able to "reset" this, so that I may use the original Citation Compass style later? Or could I create my own style?

adamsmith

See the link above -- you should create this as a separate style anyway. If you modify the official style, Zotero will regularly revert your changes.

DoulosI

Thank you SO much, @adamsmith. This helps me A LOT. Thank you. This will probably save me hours of work. Now I've edited the style, changed the title and the ID, saved it as a new file, and installed it. I've tested it, and it works.

I tried this with Norsk APA 7th (notes), and just deleted the .. section for . Perfect.

Now that I have you here, could I also ask you this?
When I cite, for instance, Taylor 2007:5-7 (using hyphen!), zotero changes it to 5–7 (using n-dash). In a large document, this results in extra words in the word count. Is it possible to keep Zotero from changing the hyphen to an n-dash? I've searched the code for the hyphen, with many results, and then for n-dash, with 0 results.

adamsmith

I'd very much discourage using hyphens for page-ranges, which is bad typography, but yes, you can add page-range-delimiter="-" to the first line of the style (the one starting with <style) to switch that to hyphen throughout.

DoulosI

I know, I'll stick to n-dash if I can. It seems like you know a lot about editing styles, so I will humbly ask you one more question. I hope that's okay. Norsk APA 7th has no period (.) after the citations like SBL does. I have to manually add one in the suffix field. Could I easily change this also in the style editor?

adamsmith

<layout suffix="."> for the citation.

DoulosI

You're my new favourite. Thank you for your time! :-)