[citeproc bug] multiple citations same first author, collapse "year-suffix" not working

jjtukker
hi,
I'm new to Zotero, and just noticed a problem when I have multiple citations from the same first author from the same year.. (note the other authors are not all the same)

The citation shows up as:
(Ylinen et al., 1995a, 1995b)

Whereas I would like:
(Ylinen et al., 1995a,b)

I've just edited a citation style (The Journal of Neuroscience) so that the collapse setting is "year-suffix", which should in theory do the trick:
<citation et-al-min="3" et-al-use-first="1" disambiguate-add-year-suffix="true" collapse="year-suffix">

Can anyone explain why this isn't working?? Does this collapse setting only work when ALL authors are the same?
Is there any way I can get what I want?

Any help much appreciated!!! cheers, John
  • adamsmith
    that should work - could be a bug - please post both your style and Zotero RDF export of both items to a public gist at gist.github.com and post the link here so we can have a look.
  • jjtukker
    thanks for quick reply, here is "my" style (only changed one line, ie the one mentioned above):

    https://gist.github.com/1214177

    I'm sorry I never used gist or the RDG export, tried it but couldn't get the (3MB) RDF file into this public gist. (I couldn't open the RDF file with Notepad, so could't copy-paste.) Here is instead a link with the refs, which is easily imported into Zotero:

    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=ylinen%20A%201995
  • adamsmith
    I can't replicate that.
    Using your style and items 4 and 5 from the Pubmed link I get
    (Ylinen et al., 1995a; b)

    for
    (Ylinen et al., 1995a,b)
    you would need to add year-suffix-delimiter="," as a citation option.

    Did you check this in the test pane?
    chrome://zotero/content/tools/csledit.xul
  • jjtukker
    I just checked in the test pane, get the same problem as before.. Quite frustrating to see you get exactly the output I need! I even reloaded the refs from Pubmed, but made no difference. Any idea what could be the problem?

    One thing I noticed is that this style is not showing up in the drop-down menu on the top right of the test pane.. but anyway nothing I change in the collapse seems to matter:
    As long as there any character there (eg collapse="f"), I get (Ylinen et al., 1995a, 1995b)
    When there is nothing (collapse=""), I get (Ylinen et al., 1995a; Ylinen et al., 1995b)
  • adamsmith
    edited September 13, 2011
    odd - which Zotero version are you using?
    Also is there anything in the error report (in the gears/actions menu of Zotero)?
  • jjtukker
    I'm using Zotero 2.1.10, there is something in the error report but I don't think it's related:
    [JavaScript Error: "Image corrupt or truncated: <unknown>" {file: "<unknown>" line: 0}]
    Report ID: 1958291228

    The problem appears to be related to the particular references I'm trying to use.
    I just downloaded 3 references from Pubmed:
    items 4, 5, 6 from
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=Ylinen A 1995

    Testing this in the test pane, I found I can get the right output when using refs 4 and 5, but when ref 6 is involved it goes wrong! I cannot see any reason for this in the ref.. but I must be overlooking something?

    I checked with another example of 2 refs from same year with same author (Ylinen et al., 1991), and here too I got the right output, so it must be something about the ref 6 from
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=Ylinen A 1995
    Any ideas??
  • adamsmith
    ok, that could be helpful. The error is unrelated, don't worry about it, but maybe a closer look at the items - esp. #6 - will help, I'll see if I can make out something.
  • adamsmith
    got it: The "problem" is that #6 has only a year as a date, whereas the other two have a year and a month (or month and date).
    While you can quickly get around that by just adding an arbitrary month to the dates in question in Zotero, that's obviously a bug in the processor. If you could put [citeproc bug] in front of the title of this thread (you can do that when you edit your first post) this will attract the right people to fix that.


    Summary for fbennett:
    This style:
    https://gist.github.com/1214177
    References # 4, 5,6 from here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=Ylinen%20A%201995

    Multi in-text citation is: (Ylinen et al., 1995a; b, 1995c)
    Should be: (Ylinen et al., 1995a; b; c)
    Reason is that Ref 4 and 5 have complete date while Ref 6 only has year in Zotero.
  • jjtukker
    I've just imported the exact same reference into my zotero library from a different source (Wiley website), and still get the same problem..
    Rly have no clue how to proceed, even starting to miss my old EndNote program!
    Is there any way I can upload a ZDF export so that someone might be able to look at it and hopefully find the problem? I'll be online later tonight again to try whatever anyone suggests.
  • jjtukker
    Sry I only just saw your post!!! Thanks for figuring out the problem, that's rly a great help! I'll add the citeproc bug to the thread title now. Thanks again for your help!
  • fbennett
    This is sort of a half-bug on my side. In the date construct passed to the processor, Zotero is apparently setting the year as an integer when it appears on its own, and as a string when there are other elements.

    I'll arrange to normalize the values received from the calling application, and the problem will go away.
  • bdarcus
    Isn't that a Zotero bug then?
  • fbennett
    edited September 14, 2011
    I can't point a finger on this one. There are examples in the processor manual for both data types, so they're both legit. It just hadn't occurred to me that an application might send one or the other to suit the occasion.
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