Sort on firstCreator (first Author) and Year

shannf
From the Firefox Zotero centre pane (select all, right click) is there any way I can create an rtf file sorted by firstCreator then Year? For example, in Harvard Reference format 1 (Author-Date), the report seems to be sorted on firstCreator then Title (but with apparently random restarts of the Title order if one Creator has many citations).

When I sort by Year and then Creator in the centre pane of Zotero, the entries are not sorted by year within each first author. I think this is because all these entries are treated as being different Creators (so Year is sorted within each): "Adams, A" and "Adams, Alan" and "Adams, AB" and "Adams, A, Brown, B" and "Adams, A, Brown, B, Charles, C" and "Adams, A, Charles, C, Brown, B".

I have similar problems when I generate a report and add "?sort=firstCreator,date" (without the quotes). This generates the same sort order as clicking on Year then Creator in the centre pane of Zotero.

I'd be very grateful for advice about how to get either an rtf file or report sorted by firstCreator then Year.

Frank
  • shannf
    Note that the problem can be improved by manually changing all instances of "Adams, AB" and "Adams, Alan" to "Adams, A", but the problem of subsequent authors remains - Year is sorted within each group of all authors, NOT just the first author (so Year is sorted within "Adams, A" and separately within "Adams, A, Brown, B" etc).
  • adamsmith
    it's possible to do this in a citation style - but I don't know if we have one that does. Certainly no current citation style ignores first names (and you should maintain your database so that the same author is listed in the same way) and I don't know if we have a style that sorts by the first author only, then by title.

    If you want to modify a citation style, have a look at the names-use-first function:
    http://citationstyles.org/downloads/specification.html#sorting
    see here for general instructions on modifying citation styles
    http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/style_editing_step-by-step
  • dstillman
    When I sort by Year and then Creator in the centre pane of Zotero, the entries are not sorted by year within each first author.
    The click order doesn't do anything. Only one column has the active sort at once. (It was actually suggested recently that Zotero remember column click history to determine secondary sort, but I'm not aware of any software that does that, particularly without any sort of visual indicator, and I don't think it'd be intuitive for most users.) There is a hard-coded order of fields used for sorting after the selected column, though, and it does use Date after Creator. (Zotero 4.0 will use Year instead if it's present, and also sort by just the Year when Year is selected instead of the full date as 3.0 does.)

    Anyhow, Zotero, by design, uses the full author name if the last name is the same. It used to just use the actual string displayed in the column, but that's not what people wanted. If, as adamsmith says, you keep first names the same for the same authors this will generally work better, though.
  • shannf
    Wow! Very rapid and helpful responses, thank you. In case someone else finds it helpful, this is how I modified the Harvard Reference Format 1 (author-date) harvard1.csi file using Notepad++ to get a bibliography sorted by surname-year-title in the format "Aaby, 1988. Trial of high-dose Edmonston-Zagreb measles vaccine Guinea-Bissau: protective efficacy. Lancet 1988;332(8615):809–811."

    At the start of the "bibliograpy" section:

    <bibliography hanging-indent="false" et-al-min="1" et-al-use-first="1">
    <sort>
    <key macro="author-short"/>
    <key macro="year-date"/>
    <key macro="title"/>
    </sort>

    ... and almost at the end of the "bibliograpy" section ...

    <else>
    <text macro="editor" prefix=" " suffix="."/>
    <group prefix=" " suffix=".">
    <text variable="container-title" font-style="italic" form="short" suffix=""/>
    <group delimiter=";" prefix=" ">
    <date variable="issued">
    <date-part name="year"/>
    </date>
    <group>
    <text variable="volume"/>
    <text variable="issue" prefix="(" suffix=")"/>
    </group>
    </group>
    <text variable="page" prefix=":"/>
    </group>
    </else>
  • jochenf
    Hi and thanks for the constant improvements in zotero.

    I realize this thread is some months old, but I didn't find anything newer.

    Is there any way to get the old sorting behavior for Creator back, i.e. "use the actual string displayed in the column"?
    I just realized that this was changed and it makes things much more confusing for me. At least I am not one of the people who want that change. For me, the ideal sorting would actually be FirstAuthor (or FirstCreator) - Year. Isn't it possible to make this an option or be able to choose between the old and the new author sorting?
  • dstillman
    Is there any way to get the old sorting behavior for Creator back, i.e. "use the actual string displayed in the column"?
    https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/8057/2/#Item_15
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