Merged legislation titles (Aust Guide to Legal Citation

pennysmythe
Hi,

I'm using the Australian Guide to Legal Citation (AGLC) style, and getting some unexpected output. Where two pieces of legislation have the same title but different years or jurisdictions, multiple citations are getting merged into one.

For example, if I enter the Surveillance Devices Act 2004 (Cth) and the Surveillance Devices Act 1998 (WA) into Zotero as:

Item type = "Statute"
Name of Act = "Surveillance Devices Act"
Code = "Cth"
Date enacted = "2004"

and

Item type = "Statute"
Name of Act = "Surveillance Devices Act"
Code = "WA"
Date enacted = "1998"

then I get output (as a multiple citation, and in the bibliography):

Surveillance Devices Act 2004 (Cth), (WA).

The desired output is:

Surveillance Devices Act 2004 (Cth); Surveillance Devices Act 1998 (WA).

As far as I can tell, I'm using the AGLC style correctly -- "Code" is used for the jurisdiction ("Cth" and "WA" refer to Australian jurisdictions). It seems like there's a workaround by entering these as Bills rather than Statutes, but that's not ideal (and it doesn't seem to work consistently).

I'm assuming that this is some kind of citation-collapsing behavior that sees the same title and so merges the two items. If that's what's going on, is there any way to stop it? Or is there something else that could be behind this?

Thanks.
  • adamsmith
    This isn't a problem in the style, but - assuming that this is a reproducible issue - in Zotero proper (more specifically the citation processor). My guess is that the behavior is intended for Multilingual Zotero (MLZ), which uses the same processor, but has some advanced functions wrt merging legal citations. That shouldn't happen and we'll get it fixed, but might take a little.
  • pennysmythe
    Great - thanks for the speedy reply.
  • fbennett
    edited September 25, 2013
    Yep, that looks like parallel cite merging. We shouldn't turn it off completely in Zotero, but it shouldn't trigger where it's not needed.

    I'll think about this one a bit and post back later. Feel free to bump this thread if you don't hear anything within a couple of days.
  • fbennett
    (The simplest short-term solution is to put the year directly into the Title field.)
  • pennysmythe
    Thanks, that workaround is doing the job nicely. Occasionally there are two laws with the same name and year but in different jurisdictions when the problem resurfaces (e.g. there are a couple of Electronic Transaction Act 2000s in Australia) but adding the jurisdiction to the title with the right markup fixes those (e.g. Title="Electronic Transactions Act 2000 <i>(NSW)</i>").

    Maybe that's the best way to deal with this, rather than changing the parallel citation processing and risking something else breaking.
  • fbennett
    In MLZ, there is a jurisdiction field that would discriminate the entries, but it's not available in Zotero.

    We could go further, and completely disable parallel citation collapsing in Zotero, but that might surprise people using official Zotero for legal writing. If your current workaround is doing it for you in Zotero, we'll just leave it there.
  • jack.orford
    edited October 14, 2013
    Sorry to revive an old thread, but I am having the same problem (in MLZ) but with distinct legal cases with the same name, but different citations (first instance, and appeal, both decided in the same year). This is by no means unusual, and I am surprised the problem hasn't come up often - the merge logic seems very clumsy. Any way to stop these being merged without changing the title? More generally, how does Zotero decide to merge parallel citations? Title only? Changing author, court, or other fields (even jurisdiction) doesn't stop Zotero merging them.

    Penny's workaround is not particularly suitable (and kind of defeats the whole purpose of citation software) since it basically calls for the whole citation to be moved to the title...

    As a related but much less important question: even the parallel citation isn't quite right -- it is using a comma to separate them, and there are 2 spaces instead of 1 between the comma and the second citation. How would I go about fixing this? Is it a problem with the processor or the style?

    Edit: most peculiarly, when I add citations in the oldschool cite plugin dialog, and click "Show Editor", the parallel citation is properly formatted (one space between comma and subsequent citation)...
  • jack.orford
    edited October 14, 2013
    Perhaps there is a way to stop MLZ ending a cite with a full-stop, so I can put two cites next to each other in the one note, separated by a semicolon, circumventing the parallel citation logic?
  • jack.orford
    edited October 14, 2013
    Worked around it (most unsatisfactorily) by using Alt+0160 in place of one of the spaces in one of the case titles...
  • fbennett
    I'll need to take a look at the specific items that are causing trouble. Some of what you describe shouldn't be happening (two items with a different jurisdiction value should not merge).

    Can you export the two items that are mis-merging as Bibliontology RDF, paste the exported data to http://gist.github.com, save it as a Public Gist, and post the URL back here? Once I can reproduce the error, I can work through the fault.
  • jack.orford
    https://gist.github.com/anonymous/6982421
  • fbennett
    The difference in Short Title should prevent merging. This works in the MLZ family of styles (including the New Zealand Style, which is close to AGLC). There was a problem in the processor, which I've fixed in a fresh release of MLZ, and I've also fixed the extra-space issue in the style. If you update MLZ and reinstall the AGLC style from the Zotero repository, you should get better results.

    Here's the background to the bugs and the changes.

    The extra space was caused by using prefix=" " rather than delimiter=" " on one of the blocks in the style definition. When rendering parallel citations, the processor removes certain elements of the rendered citation. When that's done, delimiters disappear gracefully, but affixes remain if they are attached to an element that is not removed. A small change to the style addressed this issue. I've pushed it directly to the style repository, and you should be able to get the changes by reinstalling the style from there.

    On the over-aggressive parallel cite merge, the problem for the AGLC style in the Zotero repository is that the processor's recognition of Short Title for merging purposes (currently) depends on an attribute form="short" set on titles of all legal types, including the full form used for first references. When the processor is run in MLZ-mode, rendering the title with this attribute set ignores the Short Title field: it renders the full title, transformed by the Abbreviation Filter only.

    When run in Zotero-mode, the form="short" attribute renders the Short Title field itself. With the sample data, this would give a Zotero user the incorrect titles "Metcash I" and "Metcash II" on first references, so it can't be used in this way in a repository style.

    The solution to the merging problem appears to be to always check the shortTitle field, and forego the merge if the values differ. I've made this change in the processor and installed it in the latest MLZ release.

    Separately, it looks like the AGLC style in the Zotero repository is not handling legal case back-references correctly, and there may be other discrepancies as well. (For general reference, a "view-only" PDF of the AGLC guide is here.)
  • jack.orford
    edited October 14, 2013
    Hi Frank.

    Thanks a lot. I use a customised version of the Zotero AGLC3 style (which handles repeated references slightly differently - ie, properly - and supports foreign citations which I have been adding as required). Could you clarify which block was incorrectly using a prefix instead of delimiter, so I can modify my style accordingly? How would I go about changing the parallel cite delimiter to a semicolon instead of a comma? For eg, 'Case name (2011) 123 ALR 456; [2011] HCA 5'?

    Am I reading your post correctly in that this was the only problem that had its root in the style (the merge problem will vanish with the new processor)? You mention the form="short" attribute, but I wouldn't have thought the merge logic was style dependent? I'm not quite following this part ... Though I do recall at some point when mucking around with the style I noticed form="short" wasn't rendering the short title as I expected... but I just started using title-short and thought nothing much of it.

    Cheers
    Jack
  • fbennett
    Here is a diff of the changes.

    Some aspects of merging are style dependent, but a difference in Short Title (or Jurisdiction, which I'll fix up when I have time to build a test for it) should block merging in any style. The items that are removed are style-dependent. That's the tricky part, but that all seems to be working correctly.

    About the connecting punctuation, that may be hard-wired in the processor, I'll have to check when I get a chance. If it is hard-wired, we can extend the CSL-m language schema to allow configuration.
  • rose_torossian
    edited December 14, 2013
    Hi,

    You guys seem to be using AGLC3 style but I can't seem to find it for Zotero. Can you tell me where I can go to get it?
  • adamsmith
    http://zotero.org/styles?q=AGLC
  • rose_torossian
    Wow that was an unexpected quick response! Thank you Adam :-)
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