In-text versus parenthetical citations -- is it supported?

jdpipe

I have just started using Zotero and I am very puzzled by what appears to be a big gap in the functionality, namely that I can't use a combination of "Author (Year)" and "(Author, Year)" citations within a single document. In Latex, this would be supported via \citet (for an in-text citation, like "Jones (2020) discussed..." and \citep (for a parenthetical citation, like "This thing happened in 1968 (Jones, 2020)". I found the "omit author" option, but this seems like an extremely poor cousin to the Latex approach -- it seems to suggest that I must manually re-type the author name/names for each citation I want to make.

Am I missing something? Can anyone tell me what the correct way is to do this in Zotero with LibreOffice?

I am using latest Zotero 6.0.13 with LibreOffice 7.2.7.2, with the 5.0.23 LibreOffice extension.


https://www.zotero.org/support/libreoffice_writer_plugin_usage

jdpipe

I found the "show editor" option in the "Classic View", which looks like it works as a hack, but "doing so is strongly discouraged."
https://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_usage_classic

dstillman

Don’t edit citations manually. As you note, you just click on the citation bubble in the main citation dialog and use Omit Author.

A future version will improve this to avoid the need for typing the author manually, though in some cases you’d need to anyway, since you might be saying “Jones’s” or similar.

(The relevant term here is “narrative citation”.)

jdpipe

OK, yes, 'narrative' is a better term. https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/citations/basic-principles/parenthetical-versus-narrative.

Just wanted to reiterate about the Latex functionality around '\citet' and '\citep'. With this kind of 'tagging' of citation types, one can have fully automatic switching between numbered and author-year citation styles, with no need for typing author names.

The work of \citet{Jones2020} has been questioned for its rigour \citep{Smith2021}.
<-->
The work of Jones et al. (2020) has been questioned for its rigour (Smith, 2021).
<-->
The work of Jones et al. [1] has been questioned for its rigour [2].

I can see that this "omit author" option somehow provides this behaviour, but depends on hand-typed author names. In cases where you really wanted to do something like that, the Latex way of doing it would be to use "Jones' paper (\citeyear{Jones2020})..." -- but you've lost the benefits of above in that case. Latex also supplies \citeauthor to get the cited name ("Jones et al." or "Smith").

Another issue with the "omit author" option is that some journals require italicised "et al". -- but if the author name has been hand-typed then you can't automate that stylisation.

Full automatic support for these 'narrative citations' is a very important if not critical feature for many writers, I would say. Increasingly one must be able to reformat a paper for a different citation style, because of journals 'passing on' papers to an alternative journal after editorial review. It would be great if it can be added soon.

See also:
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/88021/narrative-citations-apa-7th-edition
https://github.com/zotero/zotero/issues/1580 ("in-text citations"!)