Do you encounter this problem for all the items in your library, or only for certain ones?

> Do you encounter this problem for all the items in your library

Yes, every single one. Although I should note that my library isn't very big yet, since I just started (maybe 30-40 items).

> What item type are you trying to cite?

Books, book sections, and journal articles.

Also, further experimentation shows additional problems. First, it's exporting rich text, so if I drag a citation into a text editor instead of a word processor, I get black squares instead of quotation marks--any way to get it back to the original behavior of just using ASCII text? And here are the other oddities:

A) with both book sections and journal articles, it leaves out the page numbers. If the item has a URL, it will substitute that for the page numbers, but if there's no URL, it doesn't put anything at the end.

B) with book sections, even though the item's entry designates the author correctly as "author", when Zotero generates the citation, an "ed." is appended to the author's name, and the editor is also included up front with the author AS WELL AS appearing again, this time correctly, later on.

Examples follow. Again, this is Chicago style, note without bibliography:

A) BOOK SECTION, WHAT THE CITATION SHOULD LOOK LIKE (DATABASE ENTRY HAS NO SERIES AND NO URL):

1. Niklas Luhmann, "Familiarity, confidence, trust: problems and alternatives," in Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations, ed. Diego Gambetta (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 94-107.

WHAT ZOTERO IS GENERATING:

1. Niklas Luhmann, ed. ["ED." SHOULDN'T BE APPENDED] Diego Gambetta [THIS NAME SHOULDN'T BE HERE], in Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations, ed. Diego Gambetta (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988) [PAGE NUMBERS SHOULD BE HERE BUT AREN'T].

=====

B) BOOK, WHAT THE CITATION SHOULD LOOK LIKE:

1. Henry Roseveare, The Financial Revolution, 1660-1760, Seminar studies in history (London: Longman, 1991).

WHAT ZOTERO IS GENERATING (THIS DATABASE ITEM HAS A SERIES ENTRY; THE SERIES MAY LOOK LIKE A TITLE, BUT IT'S THE SERIES):

1. Henry Roseveare, Seminar studies in history (London: Longman, 1991).

=====

C) JOURNAL ARTICLE, WHAT THE CITATION SHOULD LOOK LIKE:

1. Terry M. Moe, "The New Economics of Organization," American Journal of Political Science 28, no. 4 (November 1984): 739-777.

WHAT ZOTERO IS GENERATING (THIS DATABASE ENTRY HAS A URL):

1. Terry M. Moe, American Journal of Political Science 28, no. 4 (November 1984), http://www.jstor.org.libproxy.wustl.edu/stable/2110997.

========

Once again, when I try other styles such as the Am Psych Assn or the political-science style, Zotero creates the entries correctly.

I'm not a professional programmer, but I have some JavaScript experience, and if I had to guess--although I realize this might be waaaaaay off--I'd say that when Zotero gets a command to create a bibliographic reference, it creates an array out of the database item's entries, then goes down that array in an order particular to the selected style, building the reference in that style's sequence with the text from each entry. So perhaps, though only for Chicago style, the code that controls the order in which Zotero parses the array has gotten messed up--maybe it's starting to parse references at item 1 instead of item 0. That would explain why the title is left out (it's item 0 in the array, at least if the array is constructed in the same order as entries are presented in Zotero's GUI), and it might also explain why the pages are left out and the URL substituted (if one exists).

Or maybe not. My theory doesn't explain why "ed." gets appended to the author, nor why the publication information is correctly generated. So I dunno...help?

Thanks,
Mike300

> I tried Chicago note w/o bibliography and I get no such errors.

I wouldn't expect you to. My installation was working fine, then for no particular reason I can think of, it has started doing these things. Clearly I did something to corrupt Zotero, but what it was I couldn't begin to say. It was creating correctly formatted Chicago-style bib entries about 6 days ago. Then, in the interval, there were about 3 days of heavy computer use and one session of citation-gathering, then I tried to created bib entries again, only to encounter this new incorrect behavior. And I reiterate that it only seems to be doing this to Chicago style. Other styles remain unaffected. Unfortunately, I need to use Chicago, so I need to resolve this problem.

> What version of Zotero are you using?

Firefox 2.0.0.16; Zotero 1.0.0rc3.

Thanks,
Mike

Dan--Oops, sorry, I upgraded prior to reading your last paragraph. I read your first sentence, hopped over to the home page and did it, and then tried to generate a footnote. Lo and behold, it's working again; the errors aren't occurring.

So, apologies, I can't answer the questions in your last paragraph, except to say that I've had Zotero installed for about 7 months but haven't gotten around to using it until now. At this juncture, I don't recall whether I got it from mozilla.org or from here.

--Mike

> you might want to enable it

Good tip.

> I'd also recommend upgrading to Firefox 3

Well, there IS a specific reason I haven't done that...I use Spiderzilla, and while supposedly you can get it to work with 3, I don't want to rock the boat.

But thanks for your help. I was absolutely flabbergasted by the weird issues I was having, though I do feel a little foolish that they were resolved by a mere update.

--Mike