Upgrade StorageNon-Western Name Ordering in Bibliographies
Special thanks to the developers of Zotero for a wonderful service and a great product. I am hoping to someday move all of my work into Zotero.
I have a question whose answer I am unable to find in these discussions, and I am sure that it is relevant to other users. My work is on Southeast Asia, meaning that I deal with all sorts of name ordering conventions other than Western ones. I do not see how Zotero can be supporting these other naming conventions in order to incorporate into bibliographies and in-text citations.
My problem comes from Malay and Chinese names. Consider two (fake) authors whose work I cite, Abdul Rahman Abdul Malik (Malay) and Khoo Kin Tay (Chinese).
The "surnames" of these authors are "Abdul Rahman" and "Khoo," respectively. So in in-text citations, they should appear as (Abdul Rahman 1994) and (Khoo 2000). They would also be alphabetized by these names. But as far as I can tell, if I put these names in the "last name" field, any bibliography created by Zotero will output their names as follows:
Abdul Rahman, Abdul Malik
Khoo, Kin Tay
These are improper renderings of these names. If I try to put the authors' entire names into the last name field and nothing in the first name field, then I can get the bibliographies to look right, but any citations created through the Word plugin will be (Abdul Rahman Abdul Malik 1994) and (Khoo Kin Tay 2000), which are also improper. Moreover, even if I enter these selected citations by hand, it will not be possible to format the names correctly in bibliographic styles that abbreviate first and middle names (where the proper renderings would be Abdul Rahman AM and Khoo KT).
These problems are not confined to just Chinese and Malay names: in principle, this will affect every Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Malay author, to say nothing of Arabic or Persian or central Asian names, along with a substantial number of Indonesian, Thai, and Khmer names (where there are multiple conventions depending which ethnic group the author is a member of) and a number of others which I am certainly forgetting. I know that the Library of Congress has detailed procedures for deciding how to alphabetize Asian names.
I am frankly rather surprised that no one has encountered this problem before, so I am hoping that there is an easy fix for this that I've overlooked. My apologies if this question has been asked and answered before, but I have searched through the discussions for Chinese, Japanese, Asian, Vietnamese, Malay, Indonesian, Burmese, and Arabic and found no such help.
If there is no such fix available, it would seem natural to me that this is a prime area for future development. It seems obvious to me that bibliographers and software developers will have to at some day confront the fact that at least a third of the world's people (probably closer to half) do not follow Western name ordering conventions!
Again, thank you so much for a great product, and I apologize if this question has an obvious answer that I have overlooked.
I have a question whose answer I am unable to find in these discussions, and I am sure that it is relevant to other users. My work is on Southeast Asia, meaning that I deal with all sorts of name ordering conventions other than Western ones. I do not see how Zotero can be supporting these other naming conventions in order to incorporate into bibliographies and in-text citations.
My problem comes from Malay and Chinese names. Consider two (fake) authors whose work I cite, Abdul Rahman Abdul Malik (Malay) and Khoo Kin Tay (Chinese).
The "surnames" of these authors are "Abdul Rahman" and "Khoo," respectively. So in in-text citations, they should appear as (Abdul Rahman 1994) and (Khoo 2000). They would also be alphabetized by these names. But as far as I can tell, if I put these names in the "last name" field, any bibliography created by Zotero will output their names as follows:
Abdul Rahman, Abdul Malik
Khoo, Kin Tay
These are improper renderings of these names. If I try to put the authors' entire names into the last name field and nothing in the first name field, then I can get the bibliographies to look right, but any citations created through the Word plugin will be (Abdul Rahman Abdul Malik 1994) and (Khoo Kin Tay 2000), which are also improper. Moreover, even if I enter these selected citations by hand, it will not be possible to format the names correctly in bibliographic styles that abbreviate first and middle names (where the proper renderings would be Abdul Rahman AM and Khoo KT).
These problems are not confined to just Chinese and Malay names: in principle, this will affect every Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Malay author, to say nothing of Arabic or Persian or central Asian names, along with a substantial number of Indonesian, Thai, and Khmer names (where there are multiple conventions depending which ethnic group the author is a member of) and a number of others which I am certainly forgetting. I know that the Library of Congress has detailed procedures for deciding how to alphabetize Asian names.
I am frankly rather surprised that no one has encountered this problem before, so I am hoping that there is an easy fix for this that I've overlooked. My apologies if this question has been asked and answered before, but I have searched through the discussions for Chinese, Japanese, Asian, Vietnamese, Malay, Indonesian, Burmese, and Arabic and found no such help.
If there is no such fix available, it would seem natural to me that this is a prime area for future development. It seems obvious to me that bibliographers and software developers will have to at some day confront the fact that at least a third of the world's people (probably closer to half) do not follow Western name ordering conventions!
Again, thank you so much for a great product, and I apologize if this question has an obvious answer that I have overlooked.
The Citation Style Language (CSL) Zotero uses (and that I designed) is pretty generic about names. It basically assumes two types of personal names: those that sort as displayed (Asia, etc.), and those that don''t (most Western names). But I've yet to come across anyone that's ever really tested this.
Also note that when toggling back and forth with a Malay (and by implication any Arabic) name, you can get some important errors. Here's what happens with the name "Abdul Rahman Abdul Malik." I start out with "Abdul Rahman" in the LAST NAME field and "Abdul Malik" in the FIRST NAME field. When I toggle to one name, I get "Abdul Malik Abdul Rahman" which is incorrect (wrong order). When I toggle back, I get "Rahman" in the LAST NAME field and "Abdul Malik Abdul" in the FIRST NAME field. If I start with the correct full name in the single field ("Abdul Rahman Abdul Malik") and toggle to two names, I get "Malik" in the LAST NAME FIELD" and "Abdul Rahman Abdul" in the FIRST NAME FIELD.
Thanks so much for your help. Again, Zotero is a fantastic product and this is one of the only things that keeps me from embracing it completely.
The problem with the full name option is you then have no way to distinguish the given names (which can be dropped or initialized) from the family names. I think to really solve your (very legitimate) issue, Zotero would need to make it possible (maybe with a checkbox?) to distinguish among different kinds of personal names. From a discussion on the CSL dev list, I recall someone mentioned there are actually three forms, with the third being IIRC "Icelandic."
I'm working on an import/export model that Zotero plans to adopt. We'll use FOAF for describing people and organizations. FOAF isn't per se designed for this, but I think the solution is to encode family and given names using a language tag, and to tie formatting and sorting rules to those tags.
Does that makes sense to you?
Icelandic is really just a patronymic system like Arabic, so the same forms should work. Abdul Rahman Abdul Malik means implicitly "Abdul Rahman son of Abdul Malik," just like Martin Magnusson means "Martin son of Magnus."
Second, I think that a checkbox for bibliographic entries would be ideal. But in general, I think that most names could be dealt with in the sense that the last name is connected to the first name with a comma (the standard way) or that it is not (the Malay and Chinese [and Vietnamese, etc.] way).
The checkbox could allow users to put in names as they see fit (last name or surname or cited name in one field, first and second and whatever else in another field), and then choose to either display names in the standard or nonstandard way. In bibliographies, alphabetized by the cited name, this would mean with a comma separating the last name from the first name, or not. In footnotes, where names appear as they are spoken, this would mean putting first in front of last (as standard), or not (last would stay in front of first, no commas separating them). I bet that this would solve problems for 99% of the world's languages, and it should be relatively trivial to implement, no?
Does this make sense?
However, the single-field mode does currently have certain limitations, as you've discovered, tpep. See my post on the XBiblio list for more about this. What I suggest there (that we add a per-creator field for short citation name, and possibly a sort field for each creator as well) might be insufficient, but, as I also say there, "it seems that any solution that asks the user to enter discrete parts for non-Western names might be inadequate". (How do you have users enter "Abu Karim Muhammad al-Jamil ibn Nidal ibn Abdulaziz al-Filistini" and have all parts of the software do what they're supposed to?)
Suggestions more than welcome.
It need not have been this way. His predecessor, Megawati Sukarnoputri, did not go by Sukarnoputri, by rather by Megawati. (Sukarnoputri just means daughter of Sukarno.)
But let's not get wrapped up in that discussion of past decisions, since it doesn't help us move forward, and this is a difficult issue (as well know). My bad for bringing it up.
tpep: you understand the problems; how would *you* solve them?
To answer your question, bdarcus, I would implement the very system that I just suggested. Still have the last name field and the first/middle name field, just an option to connect with a comma/reorder or not. So we have someone whose name is Jane A. Smith. Enter Smith as LASTNAME and Jane A. as FIRSTNAME. If you leave the box for standard style checked, you get
STANDARD STYLE
bibliography: Smith, Jane A.
footnotes: Jane A. Smith
citations: Smith
If you uncheck a box for standard style, you get
UNSTANDARD STYLE
bibliography: Smith Jane A.
footnotes: Smith Jane A.
citations: Smith
Because it's a Western name, we know to use the standard style. If you do the same thing with Khoo Kin Tay, you get the following.
STANDARD STYLE
bibliography: Khoo, Kin Tay
footnotes: Kin Tay Khoo
citations: Khoo
NONSTANDARD STYLE
bibliography: Khoo Kin Tay
footnotes: Khoo Kin Tay
citations: Khoo
Because it's a Chinese name, we know to use the non-standard style.
This would handle Vietnamese names, traditional Japanese and Korean names, and even every kind of Malay and Indonesian and Thai and Icelandic convention that I can think of. Martin Magnusson wouldn't even have to worry--if he wanted to be alphabetized by Martin, he could put Martin as his LASTNAME and use the non-standard style; if not, just enter it like any other European name.
Incidentally, it would not solve every Arabic problem, but the vast majority of them. For Abu Kasim Muhammad al-Jamil ibn Nidal ibn Abdulaziz al-Filistini, presumably the person wants to be cited as Abu Kasim. Then just choose the non-standard naming convention and enter "Muhammad al-Jamil ibn Nidal ibn Abdulaziz al-Filistini" as FIRSTNAME. If the person wants to be cited as some name in the middle (in this case, the example would be Muhammad) would there be a problem. But this is probably rare. People who formally choose to include Abu Kasim (I think this means "father of Kasim") as part of a name on a published document do so because they want to be known by it.
Part of the challenge here is UI. The current UI has real estate limitations that partly drive the design.
But what if agents got full class UIs (also)? So imagine in Zotero 2.0 every agent gets a URI, and an associated web page, to which additional properties can be added. That changes the possibilities (and perhaps the challenges).
And if solutions do not exist, could we perhaps revitalize that discussion? I'm having problems with non-Western names, and I'd like to standardize how I enter them. Currently, I am entering the entire name in a single, rather than double, author entry. However, as noted above, appropriate in-text citations for these should only include the family name, not the given name.
Thanks.
It should be complemented with a style option in CSL that permits a style to turn off this behavior, since many scientific journals seem to force Japanese, Chinese and other non-Western names into Western order; but the functionality for preserving native-language name ordering is there. To make use of it, there would need to be some means of setting the toggle value in the Zotero UI.
Thanks again,
J
The Zotero developers follow the forums, so they will have read your note and the replies. I myself work in Japan, so this is an item of interest to me.
What would be really helpful is to have one or more pointers to style guides that require native ordering for non-Western names. If you have a link to hand, feel free to post it to this thread. It raises the profile of an issue to pin it down as a requirement for a particular style or category of styles.
(In response to Bruce above, the solution I have in mind in the processor would support mixed formatting.)
As someone pointed out above, some journals mash up the names of their authors. Indeed, it is well known in library and information science circles that conducting a search using author names can be very messy. The same author's name can be represented in the literature several different ways.
How should the same author be listed in a bibliographic database if the journals force different name formatting (and sometimes even different spellings). I can cite examples of an author name attached to an article being different from the same author's printed name when attached to an author's reply letter to a comment. The author's citation to the original article may use the name format as printed in the original article or the name may be changed to match the format of the authors name attached to the letter.
There is a solution for this problem but it is beyond this discussion of Zotero capabilities. What is needed is an Author Authority. That will require the cooperation of academics, policy makers, and publishers worldwide. An author authority could also help disambiguate the problem when there are many authors with common names.
I''m not convinced a (single) "author authority" that involves all these players is either feasible, or necessary. It seems entirely feasible that services like Zotero and Open Library can allow for more informal, and crowd-sourced, efforts that achieve the same thing. For example, why can't I, as an author, say how my name should be represented, and what I've published, just as I have with OL? With linked data conventions and technologies, that data can then be aggregated.
Not sure about Arabic and other RTL languages. Can anyone reading this speak for those? The problem is not with handling the romanized forms (we probably have that covered, touch wood), but the name in the original script.
"What would be really helpful is to have one or more pointers to style guides that require native ordering for non-Western names. If you have a link to hand, feel free to post it to this thread. It raises the profile of an issue to pin it down as a requirement for a particular style or category of styles." [could someone tell me how to put quoted text into a dashed-line box?--any instructions out there for using vanilla? The vanilla homepage isn't hugely helpful to pedestrians like me... thanks]
Here are some materials:
http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/ch18/ch18_sec074.html
or http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/CHIIndexingComplete.pdf
The Chicago manual of style, sections 18.74 on, provides guidance on ordering non-western names. This guidance is applicable to reference styles. Several instruction manuals on citation styles point explicitly to this section to provide guidance to authors (see, for instance, http://www.durhamtech.edu/html/prospective/library/MLA.pdf page 2, “Name Order”).
http://bcasnet.org/assets/files/cas-author-guidelines.pdf
This is the journal Critical Asian Studies. See the specimen references, which include non-western examples cited as per examples in this discussion.
http://www.aaanet.org/publications/style_guide.pdf see section X. This is the American Anthropological Association style, which is used by many of their publications. Glancing through the references cited lists of any AAA publication will demonstrate the style in use, which reflects all the nuances raised by tpep at the start of this thread.
Perfect, thanks!
(Re quotes, just manually type in in <blockquote></blockquote> tags around the text to be quoted.)
Back at the time of this thread, there was some discussion of a new, not yet implemented, CSL processor. Did that eventually get implemented? It seemed at the time like a number of issues were pending its deployment.
Thanks.
Thanks.
Basically, for non-Western scripts, we automagically render names in sort order ("family" name first), which should get it right most of the time. An override toggle is available in the processor; if there are problems with the non-Western names that cannot be discriminated by script, that could be tied into the Zotero UI to give full control.
There are probably some name forms out there that the kit will not handle correctly, but we'll see how it goes. The new processor is running in the trunk version of Zotero, if you're inclined to experiment. The trunk is alpha code, so run it in a separate instance, be sure to take regular backups, etc.
Just wondering if this issue might be ready to advance a bit, -- the new processor is "out", yes?
Thanks!