Accommodating corporate names in Zotero

ldelong · November 12, 2012

I am preparing a bibliography that has many government organizations in it, as authors. As far as I can tell, "author" in Zotero always means an individual, not a government department or sub-department. Are there any plans to expand the concept of "author" to include government departments, task forces, committees, etc.?

adamsmith · November 13, 2012

clicking on the little white rectangle next to a name in Zotero puts it in single field mode, which is the equivalent of corporate author for all practical purposes. (It would also be used for one-named nom-de-plumes, and I believe, some rare cases where single field authors are used for non-Western name, hence the label say "single field" and not corporate/institutional author).

I've never seen a case where that wouldn't have been sufficient.

fbennett · November 13, 2012

For institution-heavy cites, there may be a need to cite institutions together with their acronym or abbreviation. A style used inside one of the U.N. bodies requires that. Another wrinkle is joint authorship by an individual and a parent organization (fairly rare), which should always use a comma for the inter-author join.

Zotero and CSL is not able to handle those use cases at present.

Rintze · November 13, 2012

And, adding to @fbennett's response, MLZ does support such cases. See citationstylist.org (MLZ is a fork of Zotero with a bunch of additional features specific for legal and multilingual referencing).